The council tax letter was on the mat on Tuesday, folded in thirds, with the new instalment in bold: £206.03. By Wednesday it had a ring on it from Alfie's squash and was propped against the in-home display on the kitchen windowsill, which is where bad news waits in our house until somebody deals with it. Dealing with it meant getting the bills sheet down from inside the cupboard door above the kettle, and finding a ruler.
It's a year, almost to the week, since I wrote every direct debit out on one sheet of A4 and then watched April move the numbers about. So this wet Saturday, with Rob out on his round and the clocks going forward tonight, I did it all again. The 2025 figures stay in black pen. This year's go in blue beside them.
Line by line
Everything on the sheet that changes next Wednesday, old figure to new:
- Council tax, Band C: £196.24 to £206.03, up £9.79 (the year's bill is £2,060.25, paid over ten instalments)
- Water: £49 to £53, up £4
- Broadband: £28 to £31, up £3 (the contract said it would)
- Two SIM-only phones: £23 to £26, up £3 between them
- Gas and electricity: £142, unchanged
That makes £19.79 a month more, or £237.48 over the year. Last April the same exercise came to £33.66 a month. I added it up twice, once in the margin and once on the calculator, and both times it said £19.79.
'Is that the money one?' said Alfie, who had come in for a biscuit and stayed to look at the pen colours. 'It's the bills one.' 'Is it a lot?' 'It's about eighteen pounds more a month than it was.' He thought about this. 'Is that more than a Lego dinosaur?' 'About a Lego dinosaur,' I said, which seemed to settle it for him.
Why it's smaller this time
Two reasons, and neither of them is clever. The first is energy. Last April the direct debit went up by £12 and made up over a third of the damage. This year it's the one line that isn't moving, because the 12-month fix we started on 1 November has held it at £142 ever since. I won't pretend that was foresight. It was an evening in October with two tabs open and a cup of tea going cold, and it happens to land well.
The second is the car insurance, which renewed on 20 March at £455 with the same insurer. Last year I paid £478, after switching away from a £612 quote. This time I spent twenty minutes on the comparison sites, found nothing that beat £455 for the same cover, and stayed. Paid monthly that's £37.92 instead of £39.83, which hands back £1.91. Set against the rises, the month goes up by £17.88, and I'm calling it £18.
What the sheet is for
I haven't got a view on any of these. Council tax is a Band C figure and water is water, and each of them is a line with a new number in it. What the sheet does is turn a vague wince into a sum. Before I wrote it all down, early last year, I'd have said everything was up again and left it there. Now I can say it's £18 a month, that it comes out of whatever is left at the end of the month the way it did last year, and that nothing on the list needs to go. The swimming lessons stay. The streaming service stays. Isla's netball club, for the record, costs us nothing and so is not on the sheet at all.
I did notice that the whole thing, rises and all, still comes in a little under the £1,481.58 I totted up on the first Monday of 2025. Some of that is the two subscriptions nobody was using, which I cancelled that week. Most of it is the broadband switch, which did the heavy lifting a year ago and is still carrying a good share of the weight. The old cable bill was £61.50. The new one, even after this rise, is £31.
The one I'm watching
Top of the sheet, in the line I never need the ruler for, is £871.00: the mortgage. The five-year fix at 1.89% runs out next April, and I know that when it does that line won't look the way it looks now. I haven't got a number for it and I'm not going to invent one. What I've done is rule off a column to the right of this year's blue, left it blank, and written a date at the top in pencil.
Pencil seems about right for now. I stuck the sheet back inside the cupboard door, put the ruler in the drawer with the batteries, and went to find out why the airer smelled of wet dog. It was Mabel.
