Banking on Entertainment

It would appear my adventures with the Halifax continue. Another point raised during my review is that my Home Insurance payment was coming out with my mortgage payment, and I could probably save myself money by having them as two distinct items instead of one combined item. Keep in mind this is my Halifax advisor telling me to try and save money with another Halifax product ... I'm all ears for things like this.

So off to the Home Insurance phonline I trot. Five minutes of heinous music later, the lovely helpful account manager starts chatting to me. I explain I want the two payments splitting and at this point the assumption is they'll click a button and two direct debits will leave my account instead of one, and somehow money will be saved in this process.

What's this? They'll have to redo my quotation all over again? Oh such a naive fool! Your head's probably hurting now (see delightful amateur model on left for demonstration) and even possibly beginning to regret entering into this whole process. You know what's going to happen ... they policy prices will have gone up, all the bits you had beforehand have changed and everything's going to cost double!

But what was that you say? You have an Ultimate Reward Account with us sir? Well just a moment, we can knock another 15% off your new policy for that. In fact, shit ... lets just have a proper look at this and see if we can't help you out proper. Tell you what ... lets class it as a new policy and if you don't make a claim in the next 11 weeks, we'll give you £50 back just for being so awesome? Yes please.

Meet the new policy. Same as the old policy. And yet different ... as with the discount and simply by being me it seems, it's now £15/month less than beforehand! No loss of cover, no change of circumstance, and yet not only have they been competitive but they're throwing money at me just to use them. Magic. Now, while my original policy probably wasn't the best available and I had been too lazy to shop around ... but the point here isn't to simply highlight my own laziness, but rather to focus on two aspects;

• The bargains and discounts are there when you do pull your finger out and do something about it. Don't leave that renewal letter sitting unattended and let them get away with taking your money for another year without fighting for your business.
  
• If you're willing to place multiple eggs in a single basket by using one finance provider for several services, there are cross-product deals to be had, and in some cases you may not even realise it until you trawl the fine print.