Slash Your Bills: Genius Money-Saving Tips You Need

We chat with Australia's #1 bill buster about slashing energy, telco, insurance, and housing costs, plus easy money-saving hacks. 

Joel Gibson has spent the past 15 years hunting down every money-saving trick, hack and loophole available and sharing them with Aussie households via cost of living movement One Big Switch and regular media appearances on TODAY, 2GB, 4BC, and ABC Radio, as well as columns in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Transcript

00:00
If you're old enough to remember when phones had cords and the only thing that went viral was a cold, then you're in the right place. Welcome to the Big Six-O with Kaylee Harris and Guy Rowlison. Because who better to discuss life's second act than two people who still think mature is a type of cheese?

00:37
Hey everybody and welcome to the VIG60 podcast. It's another weekly episode. My name is Kayleigh Harris. Joining me each week is my friend from primary school, medicine ball head, we called him Guy Rowlison. Good day. Oh, it's good to have friends, isn't it? Would I rather be anywhere else? I'm sorry, I'm kidding. Well, welcome to you too. Thank you. Oh, that was just a joke. Sorry, I'm sorry about that.

01:03
Hi everybody. We saw a post on our Facebook page from one of our listeners. This was Katarina and Tracy, I believe, who were asking if we could talk about mobile phone costs and it got us thinking about all the other costs we have and if there's any flexibility with that once we hit the big six. So, for example, if you're our age, chances are you are very loyal. You have your favorite TV shows, your favorite brand of butter.

01:30
You buy from the same supermarket and you've probably been with the same private health fund your parents told you to sign up with when you were 18. Now my friends though, times have changed and rather than being rewarded for your loyalty, you may actually be being penalized for it. So how does that work? Joel Gibson is Australia's number one money saving expert and the author of the book Kill Bills. I love that title.

01:55
and easy money, seven steps to bust your bills. Joel, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for your time. Thanks for having me on, Kayleigh. And you too, Guy. It's fantastic to catch up with Kayleigh, who I used to work with years ago, and to meet Guy. Yeah, I'm really happy to be on here. We need to clarify first, Joel, that this is not financial advice. It's information that is general in nature, and our listeners really should seek professional advice from an advisor if they want personal information relating to them.

02:25
So there we've got that out of the way. Joel, you're not in anywhere near 60. Why the interest for you in saving money in this space? Yeah, well, the funny thing is I got interested in this because I started working at a business that saves people money on their bills. But my background was as a journalist and they brought me in just because they needed someone to write some stuff and to make some content for them. And so I kind of learned on the job about money saving. I was pretty useless at that point. I was about...

02:53
30 probably when I started there, I didn't know the first thing about saving on a power bill or a mobile plan or you know, anything I was sort of living hand to mouth throughout my 20s. And then you know, years later, I ended up working with you at that same company on a business called the 50 up club. And the irony is I'm almost 50 now and you're on a podcast called the big six. So that's what happens. Time catches up with all of us eventually.

03:20
It sure does. Now I talked in the intro about our demo being very loyal and being penalized for that. Can you explain that concept for people? Yeah well people would have heard of this thing called the loyalty tax. There's a number of different names for it. The loyalty tax is a common one where you pay more if you stay with a business for a longer period of time and you never shop around or switch your mobile plan or your energy plan or your insurance.

03:47
There are other names for it as well. In business circles, they don't call it the loyalty tax. They call it the front book, back book pricing policy. And your front book is your new customers who you give your best pricing to because you have to attract them to come from somewhere else. And your back book is your old loyal customers who you charge extra. You increase their price every year, and eventually you get a nice fat margin out of the back book and you use that to cross-subsidize the red hot deals.

04:15
to win new customers in the front book. So there's lots of different names for this, but it's a phenomenon we see in most industries. It's rife in banking with mortgages, it's rife in insurance, it's rife in mobile telcos and energy companies. It's just the way of the world. It's the way businesses traditionally have run. And occasionally you see a business try to break the mold, but as a general rule, I think it's fair to say these days you don't.

04:44
get a lot of rewards for your loyalty. I know personally, Joel, I had to update my health cover very recently. And I learnt the hard way a few years ago that I thought the whole loyalty thing was, yeah, we're safe, until I got this 30% increase. And so now I just make it a regular habit, whether it's car insurance, health insurance, and particularly for those of us who are over 60 and concerned about healthcare, we've also got to be concerned about our bank balance.

05:14
So how do people go about finding some of these deals? Do they have to ask their insurer or should they go to sites? Where do we start? Yeah, it's interesting as you get older because I think the data shows that older people tend to be more loyal as a rule, but there's also a couple other things that happen as you get older. And I've seen this with my mom who's retired now, she's got more time. And so she spends a lot of time shopping around and researching and making sure she's not overpaying for things.

05:43
which she probably more time than she did before because she has that time. So that's another factor that plays into it. But look, I think often what happens is that people don't know where to start with these things. And so it can all seem too difficult. It's like, how long is this gonna take me? Am I gonna end up on the phone with someone for an hour? And am I even gonna get a result at the end of that hour? And so a lot of people do nothing because they're either afraid of making a bad decision or they just think how much of my time and energy is this gonna take?

06:14
and what's the reward going to be. So a lot of it is just about knowing where to start. What I think is fantastic is that if you're just a little bit tech savvy now, we have more power in our hands, in the palm of our hands, whether it's on a laptop computer or on a mobile phone, more power as consumers than we've ever had before to make sure we're getting good value for our money and we're not getting ripped off. And whether that's on energy plans or telco plans, insurance is a little bit trickier.

06:42
I'll explain why that is, but banking and stuff as well. There's just all these amazing kind of digital tools out there which compare prices for us in an instant sometimes, at a glance, and make it a lot easier for us to make an informed decision. So let's talk about power for a start. Three years ago, the Albanese government told us that they would be saving us, I think it was $275, $285 a year. That hasn't happened.

07:10
prices have gone up, a lot of people are really struggling with power bills. What is the situation? What's the story? Why is it so expensive? So what we had was a couple of years of the biggest increases we've ever seen. Not this year. This year it was a little bit more measured. It was pretty flat. The two years before that, if you add them together, power bills went up by about 40% on average. And that was because of, you know, after the pandemic, a couple of things happened. First of all, there was a war in the Ukraine. That was definitely a factor in worldwide.

07:40
global energy prices going up. But also, just as all the all the economies around the world rebounded from the pandemic, there was massive demand for all forms of energy. And so there was a supply and demand kind of mismatch. So basically, everything that could go wrong in the energy market did in those two years. And we as the end users, ended up paying the price. It's flattened off a bit.

08:06
in the last year, but of course, that doesn't mean it's gone back to where it was. It just means it's flattened off a bit and stopped rising so fast. And then the other thing that's happened is because it's gone up so steeply, governments have started throwing money at the problem in the form of rebates. And look, the ABS actually says that power prices have come down by 35% since June this year, just because of all the government rebates that are out there in the system. $300 from the federal government for every household this year.

08:33
But if you're in Queensland, you get another $1,000 from the state government. So, you know, some people are getting $1,300 plus towards their power bills. So interesting times, because what that means is for some people, their power bills are actually are all right at the moment because they're being artificially kept under control by rebates. That's a bandaid solution. We don't know when it's going to end. And so that's a bit of a worry next year. But you can always shop around and save if you're in Southeast Queensland.

09:03
New South Wales, Victoria or South Australia, you can switch between multiple different retailers and sometimes save over $400 for a typical household. So it really is worthwhile making sure you're on one of those cheapest energy plans. And the simplest place to start is the government website, ener That will rank all the plans in your area for you from cheapest to most expensive. If you're in Victoria, they have their own state-based one, which is called...

09:32
energy compare does the same job. So start there, see what's out there. You don't have to take the cheapest one if you've never heard of that retailer, you're not going to trust them, but maybe the second or third cheapest one you have heard of and you think that they're the real deal, you could save hundreds of dollars in minutes sometimes. Another thing that's riled a few feathers just over the last couple of days is one of the big banks of course have decided to close a specific account and charge everyone for the privilege of having

10:00
over the counter withdrawals of their own cash. I think they've pulled back a little bit on that recently. But there are some banks that offer specific accounts and higher interest rates for seniors as well, isn't there? Yeah, there are there's actually quite a few interesting kind of products for seniors or over 50s out there, whether it's insurance or banking products, it's definitely worth asking your providers whether they have anything for starters, you know, there are some insurance companies that only sell to over 50s, for example, AP is the one I've got in mind.

10:30
I've seen NRMA has policies that are only available to over 50s, you know, there are banking products that are only available to seniors and you know, and then there's also groups like Australian seniors who sell insurance to their members, which isn't necessarily limited to seniors, but it's market that seniors so yeah, there are definitely some products out there and it's also true of the sort of government rebates I was just talking about. So if you're in New South Wales, for example, you can get a rebate.

10:58
if you have a Commonwealth Seniors Health Card. And that card is massively undersubscribed. There's actually probably tens of thousands of people around the country who could get that card and don't know it, because it's income tested, not asset tested. And if you get that card, then it entitles you to an extra energy rebate in some states, for example, in New South Wales. So yeah, it's definitely worth tapping in as much as you can to whatever's available to you as you get older that may not have been available before.

11:29
Seniors cards in each state will have a range of different kind of deals and discounts that are attached to them as well. Some states have, I'm thinking of South Australia here definitely, maybe even New South Wales. There's an energy plan which is only available to seniors and the state government kind of shops that around each year to different retailers to get the best deal. So yeah.

11:51
make the most of it. You talk Joel about asking the question of your provider, irrespective of whether it's health insurance or electricity and it sounds easy, but how does that conversation go? Do you ring them up and go, hey dude, what can you do for me? Just talk us through that conversation because a lot of people actually wouldn't be comfortable doing that. How do you do it without being coming across as a narc? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people aren't comfortable. I mean, I actually think...

12:19
I've written in my books that I don't think Australians as a culture are necessarily comfortable with with negotiating and bartering. It's not something we do in our everyday lives. Like, you know, some of the big box retailers will let you come in and do a price match if you've found a price somewhere else. But that's actually not part of our sort of heritage in the way that you go to Bali and everything's negotiable, right. So, so we've had to learn that skill a bit. The important thing isn't that you're a great born negotiator. The important thing is that you have some form of leverage.

12:50
Because if you call someone up or write them an email or send them a live chat message and you say, I've been offered an energy plan, which is 20% off the government reference price. And the one you're offering me is only 10% off the government reference price. That is the best negotiating tool you can have is a better offer from somewhere else. And what will happen and you know, I've just been through this talking to my dad on the phone in the last week.

13:19
He sent me his power bill. I used that energy made easy website to compare what was out there. I sent him a couple of ideas for some of the cheapest ones that were on the market. He switched to one of those. Then he got a call from his old provider saying, where are you going? Oh, we've got this fantastic deal for you that we may not have mentioned before. Okay, we don't advertise it, but it's here. We found it in the bottom drawer and they're claiming it's cheaper than anything that is out there on the open market. So...

13:48
Sometimes it's just having that better offer, having one foot out the door, letting them know you're prepared to move. That makes a massive difference because it actually puts you into, and again, businesses have these different terminologies they use about customers. They talk about price chases as being one of the customer types they have to deal with. And the price chases are the ones who are always looking for the best price. And they will treat them differently and have a different script in the call center and a different offer.

14:17
for those people, if they have to keep them, then they will have for the kind of loyal customers who are sometimes referred to as sleeping beauties because the rule in some businesses is do not wake the sleeping beauty, you know? They're a massive cash cow for us and we don't want to rock the boat with them. I know very recently, and it was, I won't mention the insurer, but I spent probably 40 minutes on the phone with them and genuinely believe that would give me a better deal.

14:44
And on my house and contents, they came through with a $3 discount. And I thought, you're really, you're not just, you're just not trying hard enough. Are you? But I might, I might spin it around. New South Wales seniors cards, um, gold Opal cards. These are things that are probably available to a lot of us. And I don't know whether it's a pride thing sometimes, um, that we just don't avail ourselves to, um, those, those sort of options that are available to most of us are either.

15:13
working part-time or over 60 or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. You should get your state-based senior's card, that Commonwealth Seniors Health Card if you can. You should get that as well. It opens up a whole new world of discounts, really, really cheap public transport, for example, exclusive energy deals that you can only get if you have that card. With big retailers sometimes. Someone sent me their bill recently in New South Wales. They were an AGL customer. And I've.

15:39
I had a look and I came back to them and said the best deal you can get is actually with your current provider but you need to have the Seniors card to get it and this person was eligible for the Seniors card. They just haven't got around to Applying for it yet. So yeah, I think that's a big one It's just letting people know what they are eligible for and what they can get And and there's just it opens up this whole new world of deals

16:02
So what are the age restrictions on some of those cards? I turned 60 this year and I got myself the gold opal card. I'm still working full time so I'm going, I'm traveling into the city every day for two bucks fifty which is fantastic. But what are some of the age limits with some of these things you're talking about Joel? I think I mean the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card, the federal one, is based on when you hit the age pension age. So it is based on the age pension age and there might be the state based seniors card is 60 years old.

16:32
or if you're turning 60 within the next three weeks, so you can kind of pre-apply for it as you get close to 60. So that's a little bit earlier, but yeah, the federal one, pension age, state-based ones, a little bit earlier. When it comes to safety nets, financial safety nets, it may be a little bit outside your wheelhouse, but do you recommend any specific strategies or tools for creating like a financial safety net in retirement? And what are some of the hidden savings perhaps that retirees overlook?

17:01
to find a little bit of extra cash in their budgets? Look, I think the big one is obviously planning. And for some people, it'll be too late. But I think it is really important as you're getting closer to retirement to start getting some good advice. And I know we've got a real problem in Australia at the moment with financial advice where, and this is an outcome really, an unintended consequence of the Banking Royal Commission where we found that there were all sorts of fees being charged for, you know.

17:29
people where there were no services being provided, people being charged for annual reviews of their financial advice, thousands of dollars when there was no annual review taking place. People who'd passed away were being charged fees for financial advice that was never been given. You know, it was estimated that up to one billion dollars of fees for no service had been charged by Australian financial institutions. So that was an outrage. It was an absolute rort and a gravy train and there was a massive crackdown on the industry.

17:59
But the unintended consequence of that has been that it's become really heavily regulated and all that red tape has actually made it really expensive. So financial advice now, you know, when you, when you go to see a financial advisor, get that initial statement of advice, the average cost is almost $4,000. And that turns a lot of people off because I don't know if they're going to get much value out of it. And B it's a big, potentially a big upfront cost. So

18:25
I would say most people will get at least $4,000 worth of value out of seeing a financial advisor as they near retirement, probably double or more that over the course of their retirement. But it's a hard one to convince people of sometimes. But that is the first thing I would suggest to people is that you must get some advice if you can. There is some free advice that's available via some super funds. That might be a good place to start if you're worried about that big upfront cost. But even that big...

18:54
upfront costs for some financial advisors. They will allow you to spread it out over time so it's not such a big whack in one go. And yeah, just getting some advice from a qualified advisor is my first piece of advice to people. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm just a money saving guy. But I've seen my mom go through that recently when she retired and I've seen the value in that on a personal basis.

19:20
Also, I just know, you know, there's something like five million Australians nearing retirement. And it's estimated that 80% of 45 to 54 year olds can't afford that upfront financial advice for you. So there's a lot of people just not getting the advice they need. When we work together at the 50 Up Club, I remember one of the things that repeatedly came up for a lot of the members was around private health insurance. And most of us have been in private health insurance for a very long time.

19:50
So you expect that when you do make a claim, you should get 100% back. One of the things like dental was a really big issue for people that you hardly get anything back on your dental for your private health fund. But one thing I worked like working with you, Joel, we learned was that private health funds, most of the money that they pay out goes to our age group and trying to convince young people to get into private health when they're 18, 19, 20, whatever,

20:20
when they don't think they need it, why would I spend money on that, particularly when I'm trying to save up for a house or whatever, but private health funds need those younger people in to help pay for us, older people who, as we get older, are having increasing health issues. Yeah, there's an extraordinary stat with private health. I'm trying to remember it, but it's something like over 45s make four times as many claims as under 45s. So basically that...

20:47
product, that industry is all about encouraging young people to start paying premiums. In fact, the government kind of, you know, encourages people for the tax system from the age of 30 to start paying premiums so that there is enough money. It's almost like they're asking them to pay premiums in the early years when they're not claiming much because at some point they're going to get older and they're much more likely to claim them. So that becomes a problem when you start driving young people out of private health insurance because the price has gone up so much over time.

21:17
It goes up year after year. It's a really big bill. It's actually probably for a lot of households, third biggest household bill after the mortgage or the rent, the biggest one, and the groceries might be the second biggest. But a mid-level health insurance policy can be $5,000 a year. A top-level policy can be $10,000 a year. So it's a massive bill. And as you said, you don't use it much. So you don't get much value from it in the early years. And they have to try and encourage people.

21:46
somehow to take it up and stay in the system so that when they get older and they do need to claim there's enough you know money in the pool I suppose to cover and now of course we've got this great big demographic bubble the baby boomers who are all getting older at the same time so that's putting pressure on the system as well so it's been tough but a weird thing has happened in the past few years since the pandemic I thought that people would start dumping their private health insurance with the cost of living so high

22:15
actually gone up more people have taken out private health insurance than in the past. And so that's been a really interesting phenomenon. Don't know if it's partly because we had this global pandemic and people became much more focused on their health and more willing to pay for insurance to make sure that they could choose a doctor if they had an elective procedure and have a bit more control. Or the other possibility is that the waiting lists in the public system for elective surgery have never really recovered after the pandemic.

22:44
still see headlines today about how long the waiting list is. And so some people who need to get a non-urgent procedure, they can either wait a year in the public system or they can sign up for private health insurance, maybe sit out a six month waiting period and then get it done. And then they're not in pain anymore. So I think that's probably a good response. Something that really amazed me as well, which I learned from you is that you can actually, people go, their doctor says, okay, you need to have a knee replacement.

23:12
Here's the specialist number, you go to the specialist, you go and do it all, and then you claim it all afterwards. But you can actually do all that. It's actually beneficial to talk to your private health insurer before your surgery and say, do you have a orthopedic surgeon who will do the operation or the surgery for whatever benefit you pay so I'm not out of pocket? And they will say, yep, we've got three or four of them.

23:40
you just say to your doctor, hey, I want to go and see this guy. And then or or even if they don't, you can say to your specialist, listen, are you able to do this for what you will get back from my private health fund? And you may not even be out of pocket at all but the whole concept of asking a medical professional, particularly a specialist to do your financial deal is almost, you know, really uncomfortable, isn't it?

24:06
It really is. But at the end of the day, you'd be surprised how much of that is negotiable. So the specialists have their fees, the private health funds have what they will pay. And that's why sometimes there's a gap. The specialist fees more than the private health funds will pay, there's a gap there. And if it's specialist fees really high, the gap can sometimes be thousands of dollars for some procedures. But most health funds have what's called a no gap list.

24:33
of specialists who've signed on to say that they will not charge a gap for that health funds members or a known gap, which is just like a cap on the gap they can charge. So they'll have a scheme, a no-gap scheme and a known-gap scheme. Unfortunately, they sound really similar, those two things, but they're slightly different. And yeah, if you say to your health fund, I need to have this procedure, you can either say, who are the specialists that are on your no-gap scheme and your known-gap scheme, or you can say to the specialist,

25:03
this is my health fund, are you happy to kind of work with what I can do? It never hurts to ask. I know it's not easy, but it never ever hurts to ask. And if you are uncomfortable with these sorts of conversations, put them in writing, because that can be one way where you have a bit of time to think about exactly what you want to say. You might even be able to get a templated letter from your health fund. I'll write it for you and send it off to the specialist with your name on it. Let's revisit some of the more, you know,

25:33
freebies, the things that are out there. And I know you can get toll rebates, all those sort of things. Is there anything out there that not a lot of people are aware of, whether it's travel vouchers or, or, you know, I've heard about free will preparations, all those sort of things. Yeah, you know what, the first thing I would suggest most people do if they haven't yet, is go and search for unclaimed money. There are billions of dollars of our money.

26:01
sitting in state and federal government coffers because it's somehow got lost between, there's a check that hasn't made its way to us, maybe it went to an old address or never got banked or whatever. That money has to go eventually into government coffers for safekeeping. There's no sunset cause on when we can claim it back. And so there's a federal government website and each state government has a website as well.

26:27
where you can search for your name and see if any of that unclaimed money belongs to you. And I know people who found thousands of dollars in there. And you can also search for other people. So you can search for your family members, for your friends, and maybe you'll find a little windfall for someone else. So the ASIC website has an unclaimed money search page. So just Google ASIC unclaimed money, and that's the federal government pot of money. And I think there's over a billion dollars in that one.

26:56
And then there's state based ones as well. So you can just Google New South Wales unclaimed money or Victoria unclaimed money and you'll get your state based one and if you've ever lived in another state make sure you search that states one as well because The older you get the more likely it is that there's some money out there for you somewhere that's been lost in transit or you know has not been claimed And it could be waiting there for you. Um, you know It could be money that is in your parents name that you're entitled to as well if you're

27:26
if you're a beneficiary of their estate, if they're no longer with us or whatever. So there you go. So just to wrap up, Joel, going back to what we talked about in the intro from Tracy and Katarina, particularly about phone bills and NBN, things like that. Any tips on getting best out of your telco? Yeah, again, I think there's a few tips here. One is that half of Australians are with Telstra and maybe not for good reasons. And I think a lot of older Australians particularly,

27:53
are really loyal to Telstra when maybe they don't need to be. For example, there is a mobile provider that has full access to the Telstra network. So exactly the same coverage as Telstra for a lower price. And it's actually just been bought by Telstra in the past week. So we hope that they'll leave things as it is. But it's called Boost Mobile. It's a prepaid mobile provider, full Telstra network access. There's also a dozen others that have access to the Telstra network, what's called the wholesale network. So in the cities,

28:22
It's just the same as the Telstra network in the in the regional areas, it's maybe not quite the same coverage. So it depends where you live. But there's a dozen other providers there. Audi mobile is one of them. All these everyday mobiles another one, substantially cheaper than Telstra. So you're getting the Telstra coverage at a much cheaper price. So that's that's the first thing I'd say is just think about do you need to pay extra to be with Telstra? Sometimes actually, you don't

28:48
Same with NBN. I think the best place to compare, Tolco plans, whether it's mobile plans or NBN, is a website called whistleout.com.au. They're not a government website, they're a private website, but they compare just about every provider on the market. I actually do some work with them as a brand ambassador, so I've been working with them for years. And I use it myself for all my own comparisons when I'm doing my own research or comparing my own plans for my own family.

29:17
It's really comprehensive, really easy to use. And again, it's often just about knowing where to start, where that first port of call is. And you can sometimes save hundreds of dollars on your mobile and your internet plans. People think that the mobile plan is not being that expensive and it's not. But if you're in a household with multiple people, your total telco bill could be hundreds of dollars a month. And then that's thousands of dollars a year. So there you go. Joel Gibson.

29:44
Author of Kill Bills and Easy Money. I'm gonna get on the phone tomorrow. I don't know whether I need to or not. I don't think I'm gonna have too much luck with my streaming services and getting too much in the way of a discount. Thanks for joining us today on The Big Six. If people wanna find out more, is there some way they can find you? Yeah, I've got a website called joelgibson.com.au and I'm on Instagram and also TikTok these days. And my name on there is Joel Kills Bills. That's easy to remember.

30:13
Thanks again, Joel. Thanks Joel. Thanks, Elias.

30:27
Oh, and before we go, let's give credit where credit is due. Kaylee Harris and I came up with all the genius content for this week's episode. Our producer, Nick Abood, well he keeps the lights on and makes sure we don't accidentally upload a cat video instead of a podcast. So thanks for keeping us on track, Nick. Nick?