For lower bills, ask and receive
Shopping for electricity saves my family a lot of money. For more than a year now, we’ve been able to keep our summer electricity bills below $100 a month and in the cooler months, below $40. Our savings comes primarily from signing up for promotional deals on Power to Choose, the website managed by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, and then finding another offer when the last one expires.
After some serious chestthumping over our bargains in electricity, we have put some of the same skills to work on our other bills. Electric companies, after all, are not the only businesses that snag customers with promotional rates and hope they’ll accept higher prices when the promotion expires.
Like lots of consumers, we signed up for a promotional rate several years ago for our four cellphone lines and promptly forgot about it. It ran out and we were paying more. Inertia set in, other things seemed more important and we just paid the higher bills.
But one call to T-Mobile and we got another deal that saved about $30 a month, thanks to our 21-year-old son, Ben, who became inspired about the prospect of saving money. The deal also comes with a free subscription to Netflix, which means we can cancel our current subscription, which will save another $12 a month.
We’re also saving money on our internet connection. We flooded during Harvey and canceled our old service while we rebuilt our house. When we signed up with a new AT&T plan at our temporary apartment, it cost $40 a month, about $10 less than we had been paying.
Companies count on consumers having better things to do than look for cheaper alternatives, especially if the accounts are on auto-pay.
It takes someone willing to invest time and initiative to shop to find better deals, said Joshua Rhodes, who specializes in electricity markets at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. It also requires a realization that consumers can change companies easily.
In our family’s case, finding deals was just a matter of checking online to see what our providers were offering and comparing it to what competitors were promoting. Oftentimes, providers will match competitive deals to prevent their current customers from switching, since it saves them the expense and trouble of finding new customers to replace the ones who leave. It costs a power company as much as $250 to attract a new customer when marketing, enrollment and other costs are figured in. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
But only 16 percent of Houston-area consumers switched power providers last year, a sign that many are leaving money on the table. Remind yourself that the lights won’t flicker, your cellphone will still work, and you will still be able to log on to the internet if you switch.
It takes a little time to weigh the offers and maybe some cosmic energy to force yourself to act. But you’ll have more money to spend on the things or experiences that really matter. Our kids are hoping we spend it on new phones for them.
Oftentimes, providers will match competitive deals to prevent their current customers from switching.