From petrol to mortgage repayments to grocery bills, we’re all feeling the pinch at the moment.
Have you managed to make some more room in your budget recently by negotiating a better deal, switching to a different provider or trying something new? Did you use any tips or tricks you learnt from CHOICE?
Share your money saving successes with us so we can share them with other Australians to ease the pressure on everyone’s pockets.
4 Likes
Can only think about buying groceries when they are wanting to sell before use by date sometimes could be out of date but are still ok to eat for example a chocolate bar originally priced at $2 special price $1. I wouldn’t but fruit or vegetables unless i take a gamble. I have also saved with car insurance as i always look around yearly with comprehensive insurance. I will start with this.
1 Like
When shopping I look out for specials on non-perishable items like a 1Kg of coffee beans, or a 2 Lt laundry detergent, often there’s a 50% saving which might not be available when I really need to buy them at a later stage.
Toiletries and OTC medications are a lot cheaper at discount pharmacies than at other retail stores.
I switched to a cheaper energy plan, and I switch off at the power point (learned from Choice) appliances, heaters, aircon, to save on standby power usage.
I go out ‘for coffee’ only to be sociable, otherwise I make my own tea/coffee at home or take a Thermos if out by myself.
Car-pool with friends if we’re going to the same venue.
Ditched RACV Home assist, about $200 a year and never needed to call them.
Ditched my expensive hairdresser and going to a ‘cut only’ shop…after all with all the lockdowns and keeping a distance trying not to catch the dreaded virus, who needs an expensive hair do?
Fingers crossed I’m not turning into a miser?
6 Likes
I assume this applies in all Australian states, but I’ve found good savings on petrol via the 7-Eleven app. Basically, it does a search of prices across the five nearest stores to your current location and finds the cheapest. You then have the ability to lock that price in for the next seven days, and can access it by flashing the app at your nearest 7-Eleven store. I’ve saved up to 10-12 cents/litre at times.
4 Likes
We have a Puma branded petrol outlet which has a deal with the RACQ to give a 4cpl discount. It’s nearly always the cheaper of the alternatives further up the road, and 10-20cpl cheaper than the serves on the highway (Bruce/M1).
When away and travelling PetrolSpy is great for deciding which stops or towns offer the best pricing. Sometimes it pays to top up sooner and bypass the next logical stop. Alternately taking an 2-5km detour to a town the highways bypass can yield a better price and great local cafe food/service that leaves all else for the bin. TripAdvisor is one resource useful when looking at where to top up the inner driver, with a reliable guide to cost.
We also now favour self contained accommodation, or rooms with basic cooking facilities. Not all meals on a holiday need to be eat in, but every littLe saves.
2 Likes
No, just being sensible with what you DO have 
3 Likes
This one is long, but if you fancy a weekend read about how we saved over $1,000 a year with almost no cost or effort read on!
Over the last few weeks I’ve audited our household electricity use and researched ways to reduce it. Combined measures we are now adopting should almost halve our electricity bill (yet to be tested but I think/hope/pray my estimates are OK). This is all based on simple conservation habits and cheap energy efficiency purchases - no solar or heat pump water system installations, so seems fair to file this under ‘saving money’.
The context is that we recently moved house to a place where we can’t access cheaper controlled load electricity. With two resident teenagers who take looooong showers and electricity prices going through the roof, it was time to act with the help of a power meter and the world wide web.
I’ll start with the big one, which for us is showering in a home with a normal storage electric water heater. On some days it can be up to 60 minutes total. I tested our showers and one had a flow rate of 18 litres per minute! I quickly replaced that with a $19.50 Brasshards shower from Bunnings (wall mounted straight arm, Australia’s best seller) and got it down to 8L/min. The other one already tested at 8L/min, so I got curious about ultra low flow shower heads and replaced it with a Methven Satinjet WELS 5 star tested at 4.9L/min. What a revelation! Before I assumed a good shower was all about the volume of water. Not any more - the jets collide into each other to form a spray of hundreds of thousands of medium sized droplets that each hit on your skin with a massage like effect but don’t then bounce straight back off like many heavy showers. They create a constant flow of water running down your body all around like a water cloak. In fact, I then also added a cheap water limiter from Ebay to the shower and its now 3L/min! It sacrifices the feel of the shower but it functions fine, but hey we are not fussy (the people who use that bathroom at least!).
With tap aerators and use of cold taps unless hot is really necessary (in our place each hot tap turn draws about 3L from the water heater before any that’s used, just to replace the cooled water standing in pipes), I estimate our hot water use has reduced from over 500L/day to under 200L/day, and could get closer to 150L if we get another low flow shower (but I know my daughter won’t wear a 3L job). With a storage heater we can’t avoid the 2kWh or so electricity a day used through standby losses, but our heater uses around 0.33kWh to heat the tank water for each 10L of warm (mixed) water so 300 litres less warm water at the tap could save around 10kWh/day or $2.90 per day at current prices. We had a dedicated circuit for our storage heater at the last place, and yes, we used up to 17kWh/day for heating water.
So our household should save over $1,000 a year just from reducing hot water use. I hope that’s conservative. This online calculator suggests the savings are greater, especially factoring in the water bill - but it is linked to sale of a shower timing device, so not sure about the numbers.
The rest is more obvious stuff like installing LED bulbs where the old resident had halogens, running the dishwasher in eco mode and switching devices off instead of leaving them on standby, but that could add up to around $300 electricity a year saved. I discovered some devices use hardly anything in standby (modern TVs for example – I think because of strict EU power consumption standards) but others can draw huge watts. It seems things like PVRs (Fetch boxes), gaming gear and active bluetooth speakers are never really on standby but ‘always on’ drawing significant watts being ready to go. And I was shocked to find my beloved hifi amplifier alone chewed up $70 a year on idle.
One interesting fact I discovered when researching all this is that heating water accounts for about 37% of energy use in Sydney households (obviously it used to be more for us), but in the US it’s much lower in percentage terms. But that’s not because they use less hot water, but because the huge amount of consumer electronics people have (and leave on) draws so much power. A study in California found on average 65 electronic devices per household. And the power draw of just of leaving them on standby made up 22.5% of all household electricity use!
The moral of the story is you may or may not be heavy users of hot water like we were, but who knows what savings you could make?
2 Likes
I am now buying some prepackage salads stir fry veg etc someting I have never done … a pack of vegs or salad ( ( multiple items) lasts me 3 meals so at approx $3-4 it is cheapest option also grow some veg in a little plot.
1 Like
Regarding ink cartridges. Buying from the likes of news agents and office shops is very expensive. I have been buying generic cartridges from INKJET WHOLESALE for over 10 years with not one problem.
I have a Canon printer and the prices run from around $6 ea to $22.87 for the extra high yield black. That is for my particular printer.
And I have printed many photo’s with the generic ink and they look spot on to me. I definitely recommend this company.
We live frugally at the best of times, so there isn’t much more savings.
Our usual for groceries -
- always have a shopping list - no impulse or “not sure how much we’ve got?”
- buy in season & compare frozen prices (veg) - & we grow our own
- take advantage of specials (stock up but only if a long date & regular use)
- avoid processed food (eg ditch frozen chicken nuggets for chicken meat)
- Use UNIT PRICES! Always! Ignore Red tags, Specials etc, they might not save anything.
- know the price of things, even if you have to note it on your shopping list
- Don’t shop frequently - save up for one trip a fortnight (saves fuel, spend less)
Other tactics - wash chuks cloths; wash, soak and steam green scourers, they’ll last months.
Reduce dishwasher powder to what is needed, ditto laundry - we use about half recommended. Shampoo / conditioner in pump containers - empty the “unusable” into another squirt bottle and have another month’s worth.
We live on a farm - clothes - have sets of (stained?) cotton shirts, trousers we wear every day and a set of “good” clothes for going to town. Admittedly that might not work if you socialise or work, but people are quite used to seeing us in our “good” pale blue shirts. His two are over 20 years old. Turn off TV etc to save stand-by power. Bake several things in the oven at once.
Well, that’s a start.
4 Likes
I use Petrol Spy App on my phone (and Computer) for finding the cheapest Petrol, and if I am going on a trip, eg: going to Brisbane I check before I leave where is the cheapest Petrol on the way there and back, and quite often you can save up to 30c per litre or more.
1 Like
This is the one I want. I read about it in another forum (or maybe a facebook energy saving page) and decided that it was the go, for me. I like a power shower and saving water and it seems that the Satinjet gets both 
I have gas hot water, I’d love to change to electric but its out of the question on my pension. I’ll have to replace it sometime but it will be with another gas system. I bought a front load washing machine so no hot tap connection at all, the heating (if desired) is done by the machine). The hot water for showers and hand washing is all I use, though.
I’ve switched to LIFX globes in all my lamps and ceiling lights that I actually use. They are LED so good savings there, and they are supposed to last for 22 years. I’ll be dead before they are!. Negated perhaps by the number of devices I have on standby
Would you consider solar hot water instead?
The Vic Government substantially subsidised replacement with electric heat pumps such that the cost was minimal. NSW, QLD etc have not been so inclined.
It’s possible replacement of your natural gas HWS with an LPG HWS assuming your gas use is low would be the most financially attractive choice. If that remains so it’s a reflection on current state government policies that do not recognise those with lesser means are the ones most likely to carry an excess burden when trying to leave FF.
Our experiences of rooftop solar HWS with a family (Central QLD) were very reassuring. It’s a great solution. An assumption is your rooftop has the long hours of full sunshine even in Winter to minimise the need to boost, and if boosting from the grid it’s done ideally using off peak electricity. The systems we looked at for our current property, also in QLD are all designed with larger households in mind. For the needs of one/two persons the outlay (upfront costs) were not justified by any savings. We installed solar PV for a slightly greater investment and more significant saving on the electricity bill.
1 Like
I would, if I was able to convert the whole house to Electricity. When they built these houses (all look the same/similar and were put together with the cheapest possible components) they supplied a crap HWS which died a week after I moved in (and that was 8 years after the build) so I replaced it with a hideously expensive storage HWS which is going well past its useby date. My stove is gas (and will be replaced with same, because the quote I got for switching to electric was beyond my means)… I don’t use it because itss a PoS. I use a skillet and the microwave oven for most things. I don’t use a gas heater in winter because it costs a fortune, even the oil filled heater is cheaper to run (but still v expensive)… REally, I should get the place cleaned up and sell, and move to someplace else… but I’m too old, decrepit and financially challenged to bother.
Hi Sue,
Smart moves there. For me Satinjet is not a heavy feel but there’s a clear massage type feeling because it is water droplets hitting your skin not ‘jets’. Bear in mind to get a 5 star WELS rating low flow shower heads like this have to pass tests for adequate force and coverage.
One of the most interesting things I discovered was the way that each ‘tap turn’ of hot water may use a lot more hot water than we realised as our bathrooms have a long run of uninsulated pipe from our water heater. This means the 3 litres or so of water that’s gone cold in the pipes needs to be replaced before you even get any hot. So 10 tap turns a day heats an extra 30 litres of hot water a day you don’t use but goes cold in the pipes! We now either use the hot taps near the water heater or simply make do with cold when brushing teeth, freshening up or washing hands.
We have all LEDs now. The biggest surprise there was that our old 4ft fluro tubes used more than 4 times the Philips LED tubes we replaced them with (10.5kW vs 45kW each).
