I'm in shock after reading this year's insurance renewal quote.

We moved our insurance cover to AXA last year, as they have the least money in fossil fuels and related industries (most insurance companies have MASSIVE fossil fuel investments).

It was also a financial gain as their quote turned out to be cheaper (though I'd have been prepared to pay ( Read more... )

 I've been investing in Funding Circle for five or six months now.  It's a peer to peer lending system.

I like it for several reasons.

Firstly, I'm getting an average interest rate of 6% and that will increase slightly over time (the minimum lending rate has increased over the time I've been with them, and reinvesting interest pushes up the overall ( Read more... )

 When I got my car insurance renewal from ASDA, it was £1869 (and they could no longer include breakdown cover in that as the car was getting older).

Thank goodness I shopped around.  My new premium is under £800 and includes RAC Roadside.  And my new insurer has a telephone number.  ASDA used to stress me out terribly as you could only communicate ( Read more... )

Interesting to see the difference that the angle of the sun in the sky makes.  it's getting towards 4om now and generation has fallen to around 1.3KW - which is still far less than the 300W I'm actually using, but you can see the pattern.

Electricity use will rise a bit in the evening with lights switched on and more computers in us (though it's ( Read more... )

When I changed banks, several direct debits went missing.  Most of these were not a big issue, I contacted each person who complained of a missing payment and sorted it out.  In the case of my credit card company, it was more serious.  I  ended up with penalty payments and interest charges to the tone of over £50 ( Read more... )

Martin Lewis (Money Saving Expert) blogs about his energy monitor and mentions savings that he hadn't initially expected.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth where it has
( Read more... )

According to my gas supplier, we use less than a fifth of the gas of the average person living in a three bed terrace (which is what we live in).

I'm impressed.  I knew we had a lower than average gas consumption, but I'd no idea it was that low!

I'd love to show you the graph for the last six months, but I can't figure out how to copy it from their ( Read more... )

Cooking with towels is a trick I've tried a couple of times now ( Read more... )

Been pottering a mixture of things the last few days.

Mowed the front lawn, raked it and mowed it again.  I had to take occasional breaks.  The great tits are nesting in the box above our front door, the chicks are quite noisy now and the parents tend to be nervous about visiting the box when I'm using the mower, so I gave them some chances to get ( Read more... )

I just got a note from BT:
We'd also like to make you aware of some changes to our prices, terms and conditions, effective from 1st April 2010. These include changing what we define as the evening call period for all types of calls: at the moment from 6pm-6am, but changing to 7pm-7am. For more details about this change, as well as changes to our ( Read more... )