How to Save Hundreds on Your Household Bills in 2026 | Energy, Insurance & Grocery Savings Ft Joel Gibson

By Molly Benjamin, Founder of Ladies Finance Club

Listen to the full podcast here.

There is a moment I have every single year around this time, sitting down with my bank statements and wondering where on earth all my money has gone. Not because I have splashed out on something fun, but because of the quiet stuff. The energy bill that renews itself. The insurance that rolls over without a second thought. The phone plan I signed up for three years ago and have never looked at since. On this episode of Get Rich, I wanted to do something we have made a bit of a tradition on the podcast now, our annual bill audit with Joel Gibson.

Joel has joined me every year for the last four or five years, and honestly I look forward to it more than I probably should. He is the guy who knows more about Australian household bills than anyone I have ever spoken to, and every single time he gives me at least one thing I did not know. This year was no different. We got into the ongoing cost of living pressure, what is actually happening with energy prices in 2026, why insurance loyalty is punished rather than rewarded, and some of the smartest shopping hacks going around for keeping the grocery bill down.

A weird decade for the cost of living

One of the things Joel said early on really stuck with me. This is now the third major cost of living crisis in a single decade for Australians. First it was COVID, then the energy crisis that followed the war in Ukraine pushed inflation close to eight per cent, and now here we are again with inflation tipped to sit around five per cent this year. As Joel put it, it is making people feel a lot less free to live the way they want to. I think that lands for a lot of us. It is not just about the numbers, it is about the feeling of never quite catching your breath.

The upside, if there is one, is that bill reduction does not have to mean earning more or cutting back on things you love. Most of the time it just means paying attention to money that is already leaving your account on autopilot.

Where to start if you have never audited your bills before

If you have never sat down and gone through your bills, Joel says you are actually in the best position to save the most. Loyalty tends to cost us, and if you have stuck with the same energy, telco or insurance providers for years, chances are you are paying more than someone who switches regularly. He suggested starting with energy and telco because they are quick and simple to change, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Around eighty per cent of Australians are not on the cheapest energy plan available to them, and the average saving for someone switching for the first time sits at around two to three hundred dollars.

For energy comparisons, the government site Energy Made Easy works across most states and will read your bill for you if you upload it. For phone and internet plans, Joel still swears by WhistleOut, even though he no longer works with them, because it covers almost every plan on the market. He has seen people find a mobile plan with the same data for two or three hundred dollars less on the same network, simply by comparing.

The insurance loyalty tax nobody talks about

This part of the conversation genuinely made me laugh. Joel told me about calling his insurer after finding a cheaper deal online with the same company, only to be told he would need to cancel his policy and rebuy it to get that price. I have done exactly the same thing myself on one of my investment properties, cancelling and resubscribing on the spot to save three hundred and fifty dollars. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it works.

Joel explained this is sometimes called price walking, where insurers use algorithms to work out how much they can quietly increase your premium before you finally leave. It has been banned in the UK, but it is still very much alive in Australia. His advice is simple. Do not show loyalty to your providers, because they will not show it to you. Insurance takes a little more effort to shop around than energy or telco, so he suggests building some confidence with the easier wins first before tackling it.

Grocery shopping hacks that actually make a difference

We could not do this episode without talking groceries, since it is one of the biggest line items in most household budgets. Joel confirmed Aldi is still the cheapest option overall, though he made the fair point that it is genuinely tricky to compare like for like given how many home brand products Aldi carries that simply do not exist elsewhere. The real savings come from combining Aldi with the specials running elsewhere, whether that is fifty per cent off deals at Coles and Woolworths, a local fruit and veg market, or a monthly Costco run with a friend.

He once ran an experiment on his own family shop, splitting it across six different retailers to buy everything at the cheapest possible price, and saved twenty four per cent. Not something most of us have time for every week, but it shows how much is on the table if you are willing to shop around. On the app front, he mentioned a few newer ones worth a look including Grocerize, PlatePlan and Half Price, plus a price comparison app called Zift that lets you scan a barcode in the aisle to see what everyone else is charging for the same product.

Unclaimed money and government rebates

This one is such an easy win. State and federal governments are holding billions of dollars in unclaimed money, often from things like uncashed cheques sent to an old address. Joel's advice is to search ASIC Unclaimed Money for the federal register, then check your own state's version too, along with any other state you have lived in. It takes minutes and some people have found one or two thousand dollars sitting there with their name on it. You can search for family members as well, which is exactly what I did, finding money for both my mum and my dad without them even knowing to look.

On rebates, the broad federal energy rebates that were available last year have wrapped up, though pensioners and concession card holders can still access state based support. The bit of genuinely new information for us was that government default energy offers are expected to drop by up to eleven per cent in July, depending on where you live. Joel's tip is to watch out for the letter from your retailer when it lands, because some households will see a price cut while others are quietly handed an increase. If yours is not moving in the right direction, that is your cue to compare and switch.

There are also new plans offering three or four free hours of solar power in the middle of the day from a handful of retailers. These are worth looking into if you work from home, are retired, or can shift things like appliances, an EV charger or a home battery to run during the day. If most of your usage happens in the evening instead, they probably will not be the best fit for you.

Winter heating and the case for solar

With winter well and truly here, Joel's favourite rule of thumb is that every degree you dial your heater up can add around ten per cent, or roughly one hundred dollars, to your bill over the season. Dropping it from twenty five to twenty two or twenty three degrees and giving the house a little longer to warm up can make a real difference. Reverse cycle air conditioning is the cheapest way to heat and cool, well ahead of gas heaters or those old style convection heaters with the glowing bars. And if you are after a low cost option, an electric blanket can cost as little as ten to fifteen dollars for the whole season, which is a fraction of running the heater all evening.

We also touched on insulation, something Joel says most Australian homes are genuinely bad at, with draughts under doors and around windows costing us more than we realise. Even something as simple as a door snake can help you hold onto up to twenty per cent of your power bill. On solar and batteries more broadly, Joel is firmly in the love it camp, since locking in your power price for the next decade means you are far less exposed to the kind of price spikes we have seen from global events. There are financing options available too if the upfront cost has been putting you off.

Where to find Joel

You can catch Joel on The Today Show from Tuesday to Friday most weeks around 8.20am doing his money segment, and he shares plenty of useful bits and pieces from his TV research over on Instagram and TikTok too. His book Kill Bills is still a great place to start if you want to go deeper, and he mentioned he is starting to look into how AI might help everyday Australians save on things like mortgages, energy and insurance. It is early days, but definitely one to watch. He is also behind One Big Switch, a free consumer network with over 1.4 million members that uses collective buying power to negotiate deals on energy, insurance and telco bills.

Every year I come away from this chat with Joel feeling like I have my financial tips refreshed and ready to actually act on, rather than just another thing to add to my never ending to do list. If you have been meaning to sort through your own bills, consider this your nudge. Pick one thing this week, whether that is energy, insurance or your grocery shop, and just get started.

And as always, if you enjoyed this episode of Get Rich, please hit subscribe, share it with a friend, tell the woman next to you at yoga, you know the drill. And if you’re looking for a trusted financial expert to help put any of this into action, check out the new Ladies Finance Club Directory.