Protecting yourself and your assets against illness, damage and loss is essential to good money management. Be it self insurance or conventional insurance, insuring yourself and your property reduces the risk of serious financial strain should some mishap happen.

Conventionally, we pay premiums to insurance companies to cover the risk of future mishap. These premiums not only cover the cost of any claims that you or other customers might make, insurance companies are also in business to make profits from your premiums. Below are some tips to save money on your insurance premiums.

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Previously I wrote about how to calculate your electricity usage. Once you know how much electricity you’re using and what your consumption habits are, you can look at the best ways to reduce your consumption and save.

Solar or other green power options are the best way to reduce your annual electricity bill, however to get the most out of your solar power, you still need to reduce consumption otherwise you end up using grid power anyway.

There are lots of small changes that you make to reduce your electricity bill, but the three areas that will have the greatest impact on your electricity consumption are heating, cooling and lighting.

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Since looking at calculating the saving of turning out lights, I got a bit obsessive with calculating the cost of running various appliances in our house. It can be quite surprising how much certain appliances cost to run.

Knowing how much electricity that you’re using each day, what your consumption patterns are and what appliances cost the most is the first step in reducing your electricity bill.

To track your electricity usage, you could buy a wireless power monitor. If you’re in QLD, for $50 you can have an electrician come to your home and assess your electricity usage, give you a wireless metre, 15 light globes and a shower head through the Climate Smart Home.

However, it can be quite simple to calculate your electricity usage without the fancy devices.

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A popular frugal habit and one I subscribe to is turning out lights when a room is not in use. I find it a waste when the house is ablaze and everyone is in the same room.

But how much are we actually saving by getting into the habit of turning out the lights?

Well I like cold hard data, so I did some calculations and was a little surprised by the results.

I complicated things a  little by deciding to also compare the old fashioned incandescent light globes and the new CFL globes. I wanted to see for myself if all the fuss was warranted. So I did a comparison first between the cost of using the CFLs compared to incandescent, and then a comparison of the savings per year that can be made by reducing light globe usage.

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Photo by Alexander O’Neill

Our telephone budget for this year is $55 per month. The line cost is about $25 so this leaves $30 for calls. So far we’ve made budget two months out of six.

My biggest problem is that I don’t wait until after 7pm when STD calls are cheaper. Rather than paying $3 a call, it grows to $8 or more a call. I don’t know why, I just don’t wait.

We gave Skype a go for a while, but the line quality was so poor we gave up. I haven’t looked into VoIP yet, but even if we did, we would still have to keep the landline and pay the $25 for our broadband package. If you use VoIP, maybe you can give me a heads up on what it’s like.

Unfortunately, we’re with Telstra (really expensive for us!) I would love to change, but I’ve know people here to have no phone for months after leaving Telstra, so I don’t want to take that risk.

The biggest help to keeping track of our call costs for the month is the online billing. I can check to see how much we have to go before going over budget.

Some other ways to save on the phone include:

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While you have probably already received your stimulus payment in the bank, the stimulus package is only just beginning. As part of the package, the Commonwealth Government is offering a rebate on two home improvements that can significantly reduce the cost your energy bill: ceiling insulation and solar hot water.

While we know that insulation and solar hot water will reduce our energy bills, the upfront costs of installation is prohibitive for many of us. The Government rebates mean that the installation cost is greatly reduced, and in the case of ceiling insulation, it’s free.

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Photo from PSD

Yesterday, I had to make a call to our internet provider – our latest payment wasn’t showing up on the bill. I knew this was going to be a waste of a lot of time.

After dealing with the problem, I made a casual enquiry as to when our contract expires. I had received a very good offer from the competition and was considering switching. Funnily enough, our contract expired three days ago. So I asked the question:

Can you do me a better deal?
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