If you are a pensioner, check your Annual Council Rate Assessment Notice, due out next month (July). Council check your eligibility for the Pension Rebate each year with Center-link, the amount should be shown on the front page.  It is worth $250.00 a year and If you had and extended overseas trip and your pension rate changed as mine did on a 3 month trip to Europe in 2013, it can trigger a cancellation. There is no notification of the change, if you don’t check the account like I just did you won’t even know.

You have to fill out a 5 page form and a Stat. Dec. to get it reinstated and they will give you a credit for the current year plus two previous. I am about to be refunded $500.00 that has been on interest free loan to the Council!

While you are at it check your water and electricity accounts, The NSW Govt Energy Rebate should appear on your Power bill.  A phone call to the electricity company to check and complain about a measly 4% discount has resulted in an offer (before the end of financial year) of an 18% one instead, I am reading the fine print on this though.

I checked my BigPond Internet account the other day and discovered that they had doubled my allocation of data. This was great news, but no one had bothered to tell me this.  I found the different figure in a 6 point italic font at the bottom of the account, nearly needed a magnifying glass to read it.

This just shows that it is worth spending a little time on checking when a newly designed account arrives and you are in a hurry to pay it, be careful that it is not only the design that has changed!