It's a Blog ! Not a Log !

To counteract the credit crunch hitting our household any further then it already is I’ve now cut my Virgin Media package to the bear minimum, reduced Mel’s phone to the cheapest best package we could get out of Vodafone, which was 600 mins and unlimited texts for £14.99 a month, no extra charges on top, so straight away I’ve saved £55 a month on bills.

I’ve also asked my mum for a % free loan to clear off 2 credit cards and a bank loan, which will be paid back at £350 a month, but will save us about £50-70 a month in payments and interest fees, so not doing to badly there, whats that total in all ? about £100 a month saved at the Its’ a blog household.

Also cancelled my subscription to 2000AD and Judge Dredd the Megazine, thats saved about £8 a month, its all adding up . . . the next thing is to try giving up smoking again, which by far will be the hardest thing to do, but got to give it a go if I want to start saving money again.

So if I’ve tried stopping smoking before, what makes me think that this time I might succedd, well my sisters been smoking for probably as long as me and she’s managed to stop, ok its only been 3-4 months, but its certainly much longer then I’ve ever managed and how has she managed this, well she’s been prescribed a drug called “Champix” the drug works by binding to nicotine receptors in the brain. Nicotine stimulates the production of dopamine, which is the “pleasure” chemical in the brain.

By attaching itself to the receptors normally used by nicotine, Champix fools the brain into thinking it’s had nicotine – so satisying the craving for a cigarette or so the info informs us, easiest way to find out if it works I suppose is to give it a try.

and it turns out that the little incident with them over charging me for the past 12 months has now been resolved, they’ve told me they owe me £419 and that it will either be credited to my account or I will receive a cheque, I’ve obviously requested a cheque and am now awaiting a call back from them to confirm this.

So again please ensure you always check your bills/standing orders, I know I will be scrutinising all my bills now in future.

Now what am I going to do with that £419 I wonder, think I might spend it on our holiday to Cornwall or maybe our weekend at the Big Chill Festival . .  decisions decisions

My advice to anyone out there if you have direct debits set up with companies for telephone’s/cable/broadband or anything infact, check your bill and if you think your being overcharged ring them up and ask them to go through your bill with you.

I just did this tonight with my VirginMedia bill as I thought that for the past couple of months my bill’s have been pretty steep for the services I have and after telling them them exactly what services I had they agreed, it seems that last year I had some extra packages added to my account, which should have upgraded me to a VIP Package costing £85 a month, well it turns out this did’nt happen, what happened was instead of being billed as a bundle, they’d been billing me as individual packages which raised the price up to nearly £140 a month, well I pay by direct debit so very rarely check my payment details on my bank account, but after recieving a bull today from Virgin Media for £152, I decided to check over past bills and saw similar direct debits to them.

Anyway Carol in customer services has spoken to her manager and they’ve agreed that I should be credited this money, so in the next couple of day’s I’ll be getting a call to tell me exactly how much they owe me, at present she reckon’s it will be well over £400, which will come in dead handy to help pay for the tiling in the bathroom and also maybe go towards the cost of a hot tub

So go check your bill’s and if there to high, find out why, it only costs a telephone call