3 money-saving hacks for the Covid 19 crisis

1. Ask you boss for a working from home allowance

Employers can give us a tax-free allowance of €3.20 a day tax-free to cover our household expenses like broadband, electricity and heating. If they do, it may not sound like much but it works out at a decent sum of around €700 a year - which importantly goes straight into your hand.

If your employer doesn't give you this allowance, you have to claim money back from the Revenue directly, which leads to a lot of hassle and a miserly payout.

Accountants Taxback.com worked out that the average employee on the higher rate of tax could claim for €2000 in working-at-home expenses . And if they are on the lower rate, it could be more like a derisory and extremely unfair €25. (Don’t lower-paid workers incur the same expenses after all?)

Taxback.com suggests that working at home expenses should be treated as flat-rate expense with a set allowance every year.  That would give us €166.40 a year if on the lower rate of tax and €333 if on the 40% rate.

This would mark an improvement of 486% on the current system - unless you get that €3.20 a day from your employer, according to Taxback.com.

2. Switch and save

We often point out how few people bother to switch providers for things like TV, broadband and energy, missing out on thousands of euros in savings.

Well apparently, even fewer were doing it during the lockdown. Recent research from the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) revealed that the number of electricity switchers during lockdown was down 25pc on the same month last year, and the number of gas switchers was down 38pc.

This is despite the fact that a lot of people will be in need of savings to make ends meet in the looming recession.

I always thought that people are too busy with kids to mind and demanding jobs to switch. But if someone did it for them for free – as many firms offer to do in the UK – that might work better for them, as long as they made the right choices unbiased by any commission they may receive.

Well, this type of service is finally getting started here. Weswitchu.ie, for example, aims to take the hassle out of moving energy providers every 12 months by doing the switching for customers.

You enter a few basic details and each year, when their contract expires, WeSwitchU.ie moves you to the best energy deal on the market tailored to your consumption profile. 

The new free service has already acquired over 1,000 customers, who are making average savings of €500 per annum, it says. (Watch this space for a more fulsome review of this service in weeks to come.)

3. Tick the local currency to buy online via Amazon (and probably others too )

If you’re buying a lot of stuff online, as many of us are in the lockdown, don’t forget to check if it’s cheaper to select the local currency option when making your purchase.

Amazon.co.uk, for example, prices its products in sterling but it will automatically select the euro option for an Irish debit or credit card.

That seems to make sense. But  if you do so you are accepting the euro conversion rate offered by Amazon, which seems to work out pricier than allowing your credit card company to do the exchang for you instead.

The last time we checked, it worked out costing about a fiver more for a £300 purchase. It’s not a huge amount of money but better to have it in your pocket than Amazon’s and it adds up quickly if you make a lot of purchases.