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00:00:01
014: Selecting energy plans
444 Plays6 years ago
This episode is all about finding the best offer for your electricity and gas in those states of Australia where you choose your energy retailer.
There are more than 37 energy retailers vying for our business yet many of us never switch, even though prices have risen quite significantly in recent years.
The key considerations for comparing energy providers are:
- Dual Fuel – do you want to consolidate your electricity and gas? Even add your solar? This little convenience as you still receive separate bills and may only get an initial discount, rather than an ongoing one.
- Tariff choice – Single tariff, Block tariff, time of use/flexible tariff
- Daily Supply Charge
- Discount – is it applied on total bill or only on useage?
- Contract Length – up to five years
- Connection and Disconnection fees
- Green Energy
- Administration – Billing and online tools
The recommended steps are:
- Review your recent bills to confirm your current costs, plan details and energy usage
- Visit the relevant energy comparison siteVictoria : Energy Compare
NSW: Energyswitch
SA: Energy Made Easy
National: Powering Forward - Download your usage data
- Compare the providers
- Phone your current provider to ask if they can match the best deal
- Assess if you should switch
- Phone your preferred provider to confirm the plan details and then switch.
LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK
- Mia talks about outsourcing the preparation of her CV to a professional resume writing service and how much more time efficient it was
LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK
- Dinah talks about the time involved in manually moving all the direct debits to her new banking arrangement.
- Mia talks about how she had planned to start working on her digital photos but her pairing plan was foiled, once again.
POWER TOOL
- Outlook Email App – better app to manage email and calendar sharing
RESOURCES
- Government energy comparison sites:Victoria : Energy Compare
NSW: Energyswitch
SA: Energy Made Easy
National: Powering Forward
SHARE
Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
Kroger's Fresh Delivery Promise
00:00:00
Speaker
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Introducing 'Life Admin Life Hacks' Podcast
00:00:30
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Diana Roe Roberts, a commercial and finance executive. And I'm Mia Northrop, a user experience designer, researcher and writer.
Challenges with Australian Energy Bills
00:00:54
Speaker
Australians pay some of the highest energy bills on the planet. Today we'll help you find the best market offer for electricity and gas. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. 44% of our listeners think they could be getting a better deal and the data says probably more of you could save on electricity and gas bills. Only 21% of Australian electricity customers have switched providers in the last three years and 55% have never switched.
00:01:26
Speaker
There are over 37 energy retailers vying for our business and 70% of Australian households are currently with one of the big three, AGL, Origin or Energy Australia. And bizarrely, as prices have gone up in recent years, the rate of switching in most states has gone down.
00:01:44
Speaker
I think it's because when the electricity markets in particular in the states where they have deregulated, I think people switched a lot in the early days and now they've run out of energy to keep switching and become a bit disillusioned.
00:02:01
Speaker
No pun intended, Diana. In Australia, the energy supply, does the choices differ from state to state?
Impact of Deregulation on Energy Switching
00:02:11
Speaker
In the ACT and WA, the markets are still regulated, so there is really little variation in pricing. In Northern Territory and Tasmania, you've only got one provider. But in the other states and in the south of Queensland, you can switch. In Victoria, we've got 20 providers for electricity alone.
00:02:30
Speaker
So given- Yeah, I don't remember the history there about why some states deregulated and why some didn't. I guess it's to do with population. I guess Tassie and Northern Territory have got the one provider. The good old days. Do you remember talking about deregulating and everyone was like, oh, prices will go down and the exact opposite has happened.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah. So I think that it's because it's a state government are the regulators of electricity and gas. So I think this is the state federal divide. But Mia, we both live here in Victoria. So we're obviously going to talk most specifically about the Victorian market. But there are a lot of similarities between Victoria and those other deregulated states. So it's still worth listening in if you live in one of those other states. And obviously for people who are outside of Australia.
00:03:19
Speaker
If you have a choice in who supplies your energy, there's going to be relevant ideas today in terms of the principles and the criteria you might use to help with your research and your decision making. But yeah, this is not an area where you can just sit and forget for a long period of time. I did some poking around on the internet, also known as research.
Drivers of Rising Energy Prices
00:03:38
Speaker
And I found that the Grabbing Institute research paper that said the wholesale electricity prices rose across the national electricity market by 130% on average between 2015 and 2017, with household bills in a some states increasing way up to 20% in 2017 alone.
00:03:57
Speaker
Which is huge. This is a major household expense. And I guess I hadn't really noticed how much it had been creeping up. And as we went through this process, I was really actually surprised that when I added up all the bills for one year, how much our electricity bills are now. Yeah. So there's three main reasons behind these price increases. We had two huge coal-fired power stations close, which is a good thing in terms of the environment.
00:04:23
Speaker
but a bad thing in terms of prices. The cost of gas and black coal has increased and the energy providers, the generators, actually gain the system and create artificial scarcity, which pushes prices up. So prices in Australia, unfortunately, are not likely to come down anytime soon because our infrastructure and our energy policies need to be revised. Green energy investment needs to be supported. So we're just going to have to stay vigilant and hunt out the best deals.
00:04:52
Speaker
And I do think that there is good news here. It is a competitive market and there are new offers all the time. And I guess it's a little bit like private health insurance in that it's very easy to sort of set and forget. And although you do get an annual rate review letter advising the new rates, I think it's very easy just to kind of bin it and think, oh, it's all too hard. But what we're going to show in this episode is it really doesn't take much time and there's quite a bit of money to be saved.
Navigating Energy Deals with Comparison Websites
00:05:20
Speaker
Yes, the government does try to make it easy by providing some of those comparison websites. So again, this is an area where there are commercial comparison websites like Compare the Market and iSelect, but there are also government ones that are a lot more comprehensive. And that's where we would advise you to do your research. Yeah. There are a few things you need to consider when you're going to be heading out on this comparison journey
00:05:47
Speaker
You can consider whether you're going to compare your gas and electricity and if you have solar, your solar deals separately, or whether you're going to find some dual fuel arrangement where you get your gas and electricity from the same provider. There's usually no actual convenience from getting energy from the same provider because you're still going to get separate bills and they might still give you customer service from different areas of the business, but you might get a discount if you throw those two things together.
00:06:14
Speaker
It does seem to me from doing this episode that a lot of those discounts from combining your electricity and gas seem to have diminished over time. So if you do have your electricity and gas combined, this might be a really good time to think about splitting your supplies. Yeah. So you need to be aware of the kind of tariffs that are out there.
00:06:33
Speaker
There's either a single flat rate where it's the same tariff all the time. You might have some kind of block tariff or multi-flat tariff where it's got stepped pricing. So for the first X thousand kilowatts,
00:06:47
Speaker
going to be this price. And then for the next block of X thousand kilowatts or mega joules or whatever, the metric is it's going to cost this much. And then you'll find flexible or time of use tariffs. So this might be peak off peak shoulder, summer winter pricing. You need a smart meter for that kind of offer. Sometimes there'll be a controlled load or some kind of lower price at night that's specifically for heating hot water. And then if you do have solar,
00:07:16
Speaker
you'll have a feed in tariff and this kicks in if you have panels that generate extra electricity or extra energy and you can feed back into the network and actually make some money or save some money. So you're going to be charged in one of these ways, depending on what kind of meter you have. So for time of use or flexible tariffs, as Mia mentioned, you need to have one of those smart meters. But if you have an older accumulation meter, you'll be on a flat or on a block tariff.
00:07:45
Speaker
And also within your contract, the other things that you need to be aware of is the daily supply charge and also the discount. So sometimes discounts are done on the total bill and sometimes they're only done on the usage. So you need to understand whether the discount is going to be applied across the bill.
00:08:04
Speaker
You also need to consider how long you want to lock into a contract. There are some deals around that are no lock-in, whereas some providers are forcing you to lock-in in contracts of up to five years. You also need to consider both connection and disconnection fees and other things that might be important to you, like whether you're willing to pay additional charges for green energy.
00:08:27
Speaker
thinking about the admin of it in terms of how they're going to bill you, how you're going to understand that, and whether there's any other online tools that your provider are going to provide to you.
00:08:39
Speaker
Have you come across any discounts apart from that pay on time discount and any sort of health care concessions? Are there other kinds of discounts? I didn't see any, but I did see that some of the discounts, it can be hard to compare because some of them are on just the usage, whereas some of the discounts are on the total bill. So I think that's something to be mindful of, that you might look like a great discount. But if it's not on the daily supply charge, that actually isn't such a great deal. Yeah.
00:09:08
Speaker
Okay. So walk us through your process for comparing. What did you do? So I guess this is where some of these foundational elements of our life admin system have really been a big benefit to me. So I very easily one day just got into my Google drive and I could find our latest electricity and gas bills. So I had the information, all the information that I needed to compare and
00:09:32
Speaker
I actually pulled out all the bills from the last year so I could understand the total costs to understand about how much it was worth me investing. I definitely decided I can spend an hour on this and if I can save a couple of hundred dollars, it's definitely going to be worth it. In Victoria, the Victorian government has an energy compare site that you can use to easily compare different deals from different providers. In New South Wales, it's called Energy Switch and in South Australia, energy made easy.
00:10:01
Speaker
And on that energy compare site, there's really simple instructions of how to download my... This was predominantly for my electricity to download the data from my smart meter so that I could easily upload it to this site and they could quickly provide the comparison of various electricity deals.
Strategies to Negotiate Better Energy Rates
00:10:21
Speaker
And then you can add some information on the same site about your gas bill, which was just on my gas bill quite easily there in my Google Drive.
00:10:30
Speaker
and they offered up a range of deals where I could save up to $400 in a year by switching my provider. So really easy to identify where to switch to, but unfortunately it gets more challenging from there. What happened? I found out that my electricity and my gas bill is in my husband's name and therefore
00:10:58
Speaker
I cannot do the switch. I'm not on the account. And so I can't turn it off. So I need to action. I have added it in our wonder list, which is our shared to do list app for our family. I know what we need to switch to. It's all there, but he hasn't done it. He's just costing me money at the moment, ma'am.
00:11:23
Speaker
Funnily enough, both my husband and I are on our utility bills as well. I don't know why. I don't know why we decided to do it like that. So yeah, when I had to switch, I had to actually put him on the phone and he had to okay it as well as me, which I just felt really Dickensian, but yeah. Okay. So you've hit a little obstacle, but it looks like you're going to save 400 bucks. Yeah. Once I motivate him to take action. So stay tuned listeners, because that could take some time.
00:11:54
Speaker
I look forward to a future high of the week. Yes, definitely. I was relieved as well that you could use your current bills and download your smart meter data quite easily. I was very glad that my past nerd manager came to be a massive benefit to log into these sites. When you went to Energy Compare, you pretty much just put in your state, the fact that I was a residential property,
00:12:20
Speaker
I put in the details of the recent bill, downloaded the smart meter data from Gemina, which is the distributor. Yeah, I think my distributor was actually united. So I think everyone has slightly different distributors based on where they live. Yeah. And then, yeah, I uploaded a PDF of a bill and it sucked in the data from those two things to show me exactly how much I was going to save. But interestingly, when I did that,
00:12:47
Speaker
It told me that what I was on was actually more competitive than what's in the market. This is one area where I do ring up and ask about deals as soon as I get the rate review letter. I'm always ringing out going, is there something better I should be on? I guess I've kept pretty current.
00:13:07
Speaker
I was actually though dubious. I'm like, well, maybe this isn't working. I was doing the dual comparison where I had electricity and gas. And so I thought, you know what? I'm going to actually go to my credit card statements. So I went online, did a filter on my transactions just to see my payments to my energy suppliers, to Red Energy. And lo and behold, it was actually lower than what the Energy Compare website was suggesting.
00:13:34
Speaker
And I ran up anyway. I ran up anyway and said, you know, I've got the letter about the rate review. I just want to make sure that I run a good deal because I'm looking around. And they said that they would increase my pay on time discount from the standard 10% to 15% just for being a loyal customer. So I saved myself 5% across my electricity bills, which were already competitive just by calling up and
00:14:04
Speaker
are letting them to the fact that I was going to switch. That's really interesting because my dad did that recently and apparently they sent him 10 gold class cinema tickets to get him to stay. So, him and him love going to the movies, so they were pretty stoked with that actually. Yeah, this is a responsive market. I was really pleased.
00:14:28
Speaker
So if you're going to call up and have a chat with your electricity provider or an alternative one, you need to understand when you're looking at your bill, what cost per kilowatt hour you currently have off the gas, what's the cost per megajoule. You can ask about the incentives or the deals.
00:14:45
Speaker
Can they give you a pay on time discount? There's obviously flexibility with that. Can they send you gold class vouchers or is there anything else they can throw into the mix? You need to understand if anything's conditional. Like if there's an incentive, does it go for a period of time or is it forever? It's also worth asking, you know, your billing frequency. How often do you have to pay? Can you do it monthly? Can you do it quarterly? Can you pay annually?
00:15:12
Speaker
Can you sign up for direct debit? What's going to make it more convenient for you? And what's going to cost less? Sometimes it's cost less if you go to direct debit. And sometimes there are exit fees on the plan, so make sure that you're clear about what those might be. When do you think you should consider looking at your electricity and gas bills?
00:15:33
Speaker
Well, which government website was it? The federal government website, which is powering forward. I love all these puns, powering forward. They suggest that you call every year. Which, you know, great. Thanks, deregulation. They suggest every year. So maybe if you get that annual rate review letter, that can be your trigger to ring up and ask if you've got the better deal.
00:16:01
Speaker
Obviously, if you already know you're out of contract, get on to it. And I think this is one of those things that if you really don't have the hour to spare to do the full comparison, it's still worth getting on the phone for five minutes and asking if there's a better deal because often you can save some money with very little effort. Yeah, absolutely. It feels like this is one area where it feels like a no brainer, but if you call, they are going to do something for you. Definitely.
00:16:31
Speaker
It's no nice, Diana, to have something that has worked so quickly and efficiently and was worthwhile, like immediately, obviously worthwhile.
00:16:40
Speaker
although it hasn't been immediate for me. So let's see how we go. The lag is in your particular household. Yes. So we need to improve that. And I do think that when we change our electricity and gas, which I am confident we will do, the one thing I'm going to force my husband to do is make sure that either of us can operate on the account. Yes. And I think
00:17:03
Speaker
I'm trying to do that more and more. And obviously now that we've shifted our email address for most of our admin to our shared email address, that's also been a big win because it makes that even if he is technically the owner of the account, I can still deal with it on an email basis when he's not available too. So having access is really great.
00:17:27
Speaker
I think for all your accounts with all those major providers, both partners need to have access to be able to change things, admin permissions, so to speak. Mia, do you have a life admin high of the week? I do.
Benefits of Professional CV Services
00:17:41
Speaker
I am sort of changing career direction, which means that I have to rewrite my CV. And anyone who's had to update their CV with their most recent position or rewrite it for a new career knows it is one of the most tedious, time-consuming, soul-destroying things you will ever do. Oh my God. Just coming up with ways to describe your activities and your achievements and finding all those verbs
00:18:11
Speaker
without making yourself sound like a wanker. It's just the formatting, getting the company and the job title and the dates and all those bullet points. It's excruciating. So I had decided taking the lead from a friend. I've just used a CV writing service. They rewrite the content for you. They lay out the CV according to current best practice, because that's also a thing that changes like, you know, every couple of years.
00:18:40
Speaker
new CV formats become what's expected. And I've been allocated a CV writer who knows the sector that I'm going after so they know what keywords and capabilities to include to frame it to be the most successful. And all I've had to do is send in versions of my old CVs, some job ads that I'm interested in. We've had a few conversations and she's asked me some questions about some major projects that I
00:19:05
Speaker
felt that showcased my ability or that I really enjoyed. And this is saving me countless nights slaving over Microsoft Word, cursing at the computer, getting completely despondent. Instead, I'm going to get this beautifully documented professional CV back. I feel like it's going to, obviously, it's saving me time. I feel like that's going to give me a lot more confidence and hopefully land me some more interviews.
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, I also did that a while ago, particularly when I was looking for a shift in my career and moved to more of a skills-based resume rather than an experience-based one. And definitely it saved a lot of effort. I had started to try and do it on my own. And having someone who does it for a living, there's so much quicker and more efficient. Absolutely. I'm never going to rewrite my whole CV ever again.
00:19:54
Speaker
I can't update it for the next job. But if I ever do this again, there's no way I'm going to do it myself. This is just this is beautiful. I'm so glad this exists. Diana, do you have a life I've been low?
Complications of Switching Banks
00:20:09
Speaker
I do, and I will probably talk a little bit more about this in a future episode, but I recently just changed my bank and changed my home loan. That all actually went quite seamlessly, that process of taking out a new home loan, but now I really want to shut down completely one bank and move everything to another bank.
00:20:29
Speaker
And the amount of direct debits that are required to be changed is actually out of control. It makes you sort of reconsider all the things you're spending money on. I did have most of them in my password manager. So for most of them, I could do them online, but it took hours because there's just so many of them.
00:20:52
Speaker
And inevitably, there were just a few that have slipped through the cracks of things that I didn't know about. So school fees, for example, where I had paid the first installment, but the second installment was going to be direct debited, I'd completely forgotten about. So that required, you know, phone calls and being on hold. And so I think the whole thing took about three hours, which is, I guess, something that's not to be entered into lightly. I really think that that's quite onerous from them.
00:21:20
Speaker
life admin point of view in addition to the time involved in switching the home loan. So, I really think there's got to be some better ways of streamlining that process. Well, hopefully the banks will follow the way of internet providers and health insurance professionals where when you switch, they'll just go and do that for you.
00:21:40
Speaker
That would be fantastic. If other industries like energy, if you switch, it just magically starts to happen behind the scenes. So hopefully some bank somewhere is working on that idea that if you switch credit cards, the direct debit somehow get updated magically.
00:21:58
Speaker
You can definitely import all the people you pay on a regular basis from one online banking to another, depending on which bank you're moving from and to. But it was actually terrifying how many direct debits we have associated for music lessons and sport, as well as all of the bills and newspaper delivery and you name it, insurance and telephone bills, et cetera. So it really did take a lot more time than I had anticipated.
00:22:27
Speaker
What about you? A life admin low? This is not so much a low. What would I call this? I would call this something that's low, but not that low. A skirmish with low. I'm trying to think of a gentle curve, some kind of gentle curve, kind of gentle dip. I was going to solve my digital photos problem by pairing it with going to the movies.
Digital Photo Organization Challenges
00:22:53
Speaker
So we go to the movies each month and I was going to get there early.
00:22:58
Speaker
like an hour ahead of when the movies start to just have a glass of wine and do my digital photos. So I left the house last night early. I got there. I had my laptop and one of the gals who's usually late arrived early. That's so unlikely for her to arrive early. That has never happened before. It's true. It's never happened.
00:23:25
Speaker
she got a glass of wine and of course we sat there and chatted and my laptop just sat on my lap for that hour and I I mean she laughed along with me I'm like at least I got here with the laptop and I'm having the wine component I did part of it but I still have not actually done the digital photos next month
00:23:47
Speaker
This is a running joke. It's funny. Okay, Donna, do you have a power tool or some kind of tech review for us this episode?
00:23:57
Speaker
I do, and I'd like to thank my colleague Michelle from Work, so shout out to her. She had actually recommended to me the Outlook email app, so we use Outlook for Work. And although I'm using Google Gmail for our shared family email address, the Outlook email app is really so much better than the native iPhone mail app. So I've moved monitoring both my email and my calendar through this app.
00:24:27
Speaker
And it really makes it much easier to integrate my work and my personal calendars on my phone. And it's really made that shared calendar thing much better. And actually my husband's using the same app. We're really finding that that's stepped up our ability to manage our shared calendar and our shared email address as well as our work. Does the app pull in your Gmail emails as well?
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, it does really well. And your GMAT calendar stuff is showing on the Outlook Calendar.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yep. So it just makes it really easy to be able to also add events from that same calendar app where I can see where my work and personal life calendars intersect with one another, which before I was sort of having to flick backwards and forwards a bit, or I was using the native iPhone app, but I found that it wasn't very good for my Outlook.
00:25:23
Speaker
it wasn't syncing back properly. So I found this app way better. So has this taken away the need for you to invite your work calendar to certain events? You know how you were trying, you know, you were setting up something in the Google Calendar and you would just invite your work calendar so you could see it on your work calendar?
00:25:42
Speaker
I am still doing that because obviously I have people at work who are looking at my work calendar who can't see my Google calendar. So for example, where I have to leave work early to go to a school event, I'm still inviting my work calendar so that my colleagues can understand that I'm not going to be in the office.
00:26:00
Speaker
But it does mean that I don't have to do it as much as I probably was previously, but anything that intersects with work hours, I'm still doing that practice, which really is helpful for the people I work with to know where I am. Interesting. When I see those suggestions that I move to like the Gmail, iPhone, Mail app or the Outlook, Mail app, I'm always a little bit hesitant, but it's great to hear that it's working for you.
00:26:25
Speaker
Definitely. And I did do a little bit of research before I did it. And there are lots of complaints about the native iPhone mail app. So I think you just assume that it's going to be good because it's Apple. But actually, I don't necessarily think that's the case. Yeah. Everyone's got their flaws, it seems.
Maximizing Savings through Bill Reviews
00:26:43
Speaker
I mean, they take on so much. They've got so many damn products these days between Google and Apple. Can't do everything awesomely. It's true.
00:26:52
Speaker
Okay, I think that's everything you've ever wanted to know about switching energy providers. Remember, review your recent bills to find the rates for your electricity and gas, then add up how much you spent in the last 12 months. Call your current provider and ask if they can do a better deal with a new market offer, and then head to a government comparison website to find better alternatives. Call, switch and save.
00:27:17
Speaker
If you'd like to join us on our Life Admin journey, please head to our Facebook page, Life Admin Life Hacks, to follow us and share your thoughts on what we're doing. And feel free to post any comments or certainly post suggestions that we might be able to use. We hope to see you there. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com. If you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app.