Please help! Confused about change.

xs11ax

Hi,

I got the newsletter about the gas/electric price hikes and i thought :eek:

So like a good money saver i did i was told and went on the comparison sites and was told i should change to EDF Saver V2 which will be fixed until September 2012.

However i see that there are other versions and i think they are fixed for a longer a period.

Can someone please help me make sense of all this and advise what i should switch to?

Thanks.

macman

It's up to you. For a fix you pay a higher price now -you are in effect buying insurance against (possible) future rises.
For a longer fix, you'll pay a higher price now.
So with EDF for example, you could chose Fixed Saver 2014, which gives you another 2 years-however you'll pay a premium rate to lock in for that long. And if prices fall or stabilise, you'll be paying more than a variable discount tariff.
Nobody knows which will be cheaper over a given period (fixed or variable), so nobody can tell you which way to go.

xs11ax

According to some comparison websites EDF Saver V2 is still cheaper than British Gas who are my current supplier. Does that sound right or am i missing something?

grizzly1911

Only real benefit of fixed/cap tariffs is that you have a degree of certainty over price (not consumption) for a given period.

The problem is that if prices fall during your contract you lose and if they go up then you have a bigger leap at the end to rejoin the escalator. Of course they may drop at the end but unlikely.

In the long run you will not beat it.