On the morning of 1 April I took the pencil off its string and spent a quarter of an hour at the cupboard door above the kettle, crossing things out. The new letters had been arriving since February, one at a time, and this was the first time I'd put them all on the same sheet of paper.
Isla watched me from the table with her cereal. "Why are you crossing things out?" she asked. I said the numbers had changed. "Can't you just change them back?" she said, and I said that would be lovely, and went back to the water bill.
The papers call it Awful April, which is a bit dramatic, but I know what they mean. A lot of bills move on the same day, they all get a polite letter about it, and each letter on its own looks small. Together they don't. This is what moved, line by line.
The lines that went up
- Council tax: £188.00 to £196.24, up £8.24
- Water: £39.00 to £49.00, up £10.00
- Gas and electricity direct debit: £151.00 to £163.00, up £12.00
- Two phones: £10.00 each to £11.50 each, up £3.00 between them
- TV Licence: £14.13 to £14.55, up 42p
That's £33.66 a month more. Council tax for 2025/26 is £1,962.43, paid over ten instalments, so the last one is £196.27, because ten doesn't go into £1,962.43 evenly and I'm someone who notices that. Water is the one that stung: a quarter more than last year, for the same taps. I don't have a meter, and I've never worked out whether I'd be better off with one. That's a sum for a quiet evening, not a Thursday.
The energy figure isn't a price, it's a forecast. The direct debit goes up because the supplier expects us to use more over a year than they were taking. What we actually owe is whatever the smart meter says, and I'd like to check that in June, when we're using hardly any gas. Anything we pay in advance builds up as credit for the winter.
The lines that didn't
The mortgage hasn't moved, because the 1.89% fix runs until April 2027, and I'm grateful for it every single April. The boiler cover, the life insurance, the streaming service and Isla's swimming lessons are all where they were in January.
And two lines went down. The broadband, which I wrote about last week, is £28.00 instead of £61.50, a saving of £33.50. The car insurance is £39.83 instead of £44.08, a saving of £4.25. Together that's £37.75 a month coming off, against £33.66 going on.
What it adds up to
The January sheet came to £1,481.58 a month. After I cancelled the two forgotten subscriptions it was £1,473.10. With this April's rises and the two savings, it is now £1,469.01. That's £4.09 a month less than in March, and £12.57 less than where I started in January.
I want to be honest about why. It isn't because April was kind. It's because I happened to move two things in the same month, and the savings landed on the same sheet as the rises. If full fibre hadn't reached our road, or if the car insurance had come in at the same price anywhere I looked, we'd be £37.75 a month worse off, and the sheet would look very different. I don't expect to find two of those every spring. Some years there's nothing to find.
Over the whole year, with council tax stopping for February and March, the sheet comes to £17,235.64. I used to think that sort of number belonged in a different house. It's a lot to see written down, and I'd rather see it than not.
The new sheet is taped on top of the old one, so I can lift the flap and see the January version underneath. The pencil is back on its string. Thursday is my work-from-home day, and the sun was on the kitchen table when I finished, so I made a cup of tea and looked at the total for a bit longer than I needed to.
