£850 BILL!!! any advise please

nicky135

I've just had a huge gas & electricity bill from E.ON. I am single mum and student nurse (2nd yr) I get help with my rent through housing benefit and my NHS bursary but with all my out goings I'm only just making ends meet it each month. I don't know how i'm going to pay this and I'm scared, I can bearly pay my bills now is there any grants or social loans I can apply for?

(p.s i do regular meeting readings and in January I owed £200 but i was paying my direct debit regularly and i thought it would even out when summer came along)

KimYeovil

If you knew you owed £200 in January why/how could you have used £650 over the next five or six weeks? Surely that £200 must have just been an estimate, not an actual reading? What are you actually spending the money on? If you are a student nurse then you can't be at home that often so it can't be heating.

Read your meters daily over the next couple of weeks and sort out just how much you are using on an ongoing basis. You have to separate out your debt and your ongoing consumption.

Once you have confirmed you are not still consuming a ridiculous amount you can work out how to repay the debt - you will be able to ask for it to be spread out over six or twelve months. You are right that you will be able to claw a sizeable amount back over summer - (but suppliers expect this to have been done the previous summer not the summer coming up). Make sure you do that rather than take a payments holiday.

You also have to sort out your outgoings and your income in general and avoid spending money you do not have.

Pete-Scotland

Hi Nicky,
You might, hopefully, find this link useful and the links in it too...

www. advice.org.uk/index/d_gas_and_electricity_arrears.pdf

Pete

ps it wont let me post links cos im a new user - so this is the closest!

BargainGalore

That link goes to some search web site

E.ON_Company_Representative

Hi nicky135,

Kim raises a good point here, was the January bill stating a £200 account debit based on estimated readings or actual readings?

Are the latest readings on the £850 bill actuals? If you haven’t already, check they are correct and inline with the readings on the meter.

If the bill is accurate, then the debit balance is most likely going to be the result of the Direct Debit not being set high enough over the course of the year. How much has your monthly Direct Debit been set at historically? What size bills have you received aside from the two you’ve mentioned already?

Brian