O2(mobile phones) - I don’t know why, but always had a decent service from them and because they were the first company (i think!) to offer phone and airtime contracts separately I appreciated that and now free screen replacement.
Hyperoptic(Home Broadband) - Excellent! Amazing service and for £26 I get 150mb upload and download. They say my connection is 150mb but I actually get about 200mb, can’t complain.
Bulb(Gas & Electric) - Clear pricing, just one tariff and Green. Good CS.
BarclaycardCredit Card - I don’t have any complaints. I have been a customer for about 10 years I think and probably only contacted to change my address.
Capital OneCredit Card - Same as Barclaycard
Thames Water - They charge what they like IMO - I can’t access the meter it’s somewhere out under the pavement and they don’t actually read it for years.
TV Licence - I don’t mind paying for it because I actually watch, listen and like quite a few BBC programmes.
AdmiralCar Insurence Never had to claim and contact but they were one of cheapest for the cover I was looking for.
I have few others like Council Tax, Charities etc…
Virgin Active - SO MUCH MONEY
Centrepoint - Because being homeless sucks
Capital One - Mmmm, delicious credit card debt
GoCardless (for LCHost) - Which was me testing that GoCardless worked with Monzo before I told people that we could definitely take Monzo accounts for DD
Water/Electric/Council Tax still comes out of another account I use for household stuff which I’ll likely not change in the midterm!
This is infuriating, I buy unlocked SIM free phones - I hate having to flash the carriers firmware to get features that are supported but blocked for absolutely no reason.
It’s not just the UK - most countries do it. Have a look on the XDA forums and there’s people everywhere being driven mad by this.
The issue is that IMS/VoLTE is a mess of a spec and as a result quite hard to get right, so sometimes they are lazy and prefer to work around that using firmware tweaks instead of getting their equipment (aka magic boxes) to conform to the spec.
Smile Credit Card
– Legacy of my legacy legacy account.
– Terrible rate but credit limit kept rising years back so the unused very high credit limit keeps my credit file happy.
– The only direct debit I didn’t switch back from Monzo to my legacy bank because it is a pain to switch it and I don’t tend to use the card often enough for the direct debit to fire.
PayPal
– Simply to make sure any PayPal Credit is paid off.
– Only have this so that online PayPal purchases over £100 (using the credit option) come under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act unlike normal Credit Card purchases through PayPal.
Camelot
– Not King Arthurs court, but the National Lottery.
– You have to be in it to win it!
– Get an email regularly stating I have won a prize. Wooo! Rush to log in to the website to find out its… a lucky dip…
H3G
– Just moved over (well back) to Three after 6 years on Tesco mobile. Thought I needed to come back to the 21st century.
– 30GB a month at £18.
– No issues so far.
MBNA Limited
– a £5000 interest free (until Oct 2019) money transfer card which I transferred the balance to snooze it and make money myself on the interest.
– Currently made £200 in interest since June 2017.
– Online website is better than Smiles.
NEU NUT Section
– Teaching Union membership.
– Gets me days off school every couple of years, unpaid for the glamorous price of £210 per year.
– Have union membership ‘just in case’ for the legal protection.
I tend to pay most of my things annually as I like to be upfront.
If you haven’t decided who to change to yet, I’ve been incredibly happy with Bristol Energy. They aren’t the absolute cheapest, but their customer service is incredible, the prices aren’t bad and they’re municipally owned so at least it’s supporting communities, not shareholders.
Virgin are okay at first when they become available in an area, but then after a few months of work by their agressive sales people the shared bandwidth of their rusty “fibre” starts to saturate as they’re selling more than they can supply and it all goes downhill.
I have had Virgin for as long as I can remember, we had a few problems years ago. We get 200Mbs with no slow down, our speeds go over the 200. I guess it all depends where you live!
Just logged into my Virgin Media account to see how they behave regarding their latest (duplicate) direct debit being rejected:
Fair enough… but then:
So they somehow noticed my payment was allegedly past the due date (caused by the rejected DD) despite the account being in credit from the day the bill was generated in December, but yet didn’t even manage to clear the second account “credit” from the failed direct debit. Whoever developed this billing system should be ashamed.
I will also bet good money they’re gonna try and add a late payment fee on the account, and some paper spam in the snail mail about it they can of course only dream about getting that fee paid.
It would be nice if Monzo could add a feature to reject DD’s on a case by case basis. At the moment I make sure there isn’t enough money in the account (via either pots or just Christmas spending ) but would be good to have a proper way of giving the middle finger to such scammers.
That was the first bill, so they make you pay for the first month + second month. Next bills should be around 42£ as I’ve only got internet from them, no landline nor TV.
Is there a use-case for that, or did they just foist that on you without you asking for it? I can’t believe anyone would need that in 2018 in the world of FaceTime, WhatsApp and Facebook messenger.
)
they can of course only dream about getting that fee paid.