Access advice to guide your steps
A new year is one of the easiest times to take twenty minutes and find money you didn't know you were losing. Most household budgets don't leak from one big expense, they leak from a handful of small, quiet ones that nobody gets around to reviewing. None of what follows requires a big life change. It's just a checklist worth working through once a year.
Many insurers charge a premium for paying monthly, sometimes referred to as a "monthly payment fee" or built into the monthly instalment amount. If your cash flow allows it, ask your insurer whether paying annually attracts a discount. It's a five-minute phone call that can save a genuine amount over a year, particularly on car and home and contents insurance.
Phone subscriptions (Apple Store & Google Play) are some of the easiest charges to lose track of, because they're billed automatically and rarely show up anywhere except your statement. Go into your phone's subscription settings and look at everything currently active. Free trials that quietly converted to paid, apps you downloaded once and forgot about, and old subscriptions for services you no longer use are common finds.
Most households now juggle several streaming subscriptions at once. Go through what's currently active and ask honestly: which of these have you actually used in the last month? Consider rotating services rather than running them all simultaneously, or downgrading to a cheaper tier if you're not using premium features like 4K or multiple simultaneous streams.
The Australian Government's free energy price comparison site lets you compare electricity and gas plans from retailers operating in your area, based on your actual usage. Energy retailers regularly move customers onto less competitive default rates over time, so even if you compared plans a year or two ago, it's worth checking again. This one often produces the biggest single saving on this list.
Banks don't always proactively offer their best rate to existing customers, even loyal ones. A short call asking whether your home loan or savings rate can be reviewed costs nothing and occasionally results in an immediate adjustment. If you don't ask, the answer is automatically no.
Life circumstances change, you may be paying for extras or hospital cover you no longer need, or conversely, may have gaps that didn't exist when you first took out the policy. A quick review of your level of cover against your current circumstances can either save money or close a gap, depending on which direction it goes.
Mobile plans are another set-and-forget expense. If you haven't changed plans in a couple of years, there's a reasonable chance a better value option now exists for the same or less data, particularly if your provider has since released newer plans that aren't automatically applied to existing customers.
This is the most effective, least glamorous step on the list. Pull up the last three months of transactions and read every line, not just skim it. Small recurring charges are easy to miss individually and easy to spot once you're looking for them specifically, old memberships, forgotten trials, duplicate services.
None of these steps take long, and none of them require you to change your lifestyle. They're about making sure the money already earmarked for essentials is actually going where you think it's going, rather than leaking out through charges nobody's looked at in a while. Worth setting a reminder to do this same review every January and July, it's a habit that pays for itself.
Want help putting a full budget review together? Get in touch with Funded Futures Financial Planning.
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