For most of you students out there, moving into a student house will be your first confrontation with gas, electricity and water bills, and you’re going to have to get to grips with them at some point. Paying your bills can be more than a little tedious, especially when living in a shared house, but it has to be done somehow and it’s best to strike whilst the iron’s hot. Here’s our Coursefindr guide to paying, keeping track of, and organising your house bills. You have to learn someday, right?

What Bills Do You Have To Pay?

Any house will have a fair few bills coming its way – these can include broadband, water, electricity, gas and other miscellaneous bills coming through the letterbox and they can be a real pain to keep track of. If you’re lucky your landlord will sign you up to an all-bills-paid contract, which is immensely useful and will save you a lot of time. If you have this option, go for it! Getting an entire house of students to pitch in for bills once a month is not a job many would envy, and if you get half a chance to let the landlord handle it, do so (as long as they’re not ripping you off). If this isn’t mentioned in your contract, it might be an idea to bring it up to the landlord and see what they say. It’s always worth a try.

If you’re not so lucky, the two main bills you’ll have to worry about (by far) are gas and electricity. It’s a good idea with both of these to do some research on the different providers and to try and get the best deal. Which leads us onto our next topic.

Research

After moving into a house (or preferably before, but in our experience nobody’s that organised) spend an afternoon researching the different electricity and gas providers in your area and have a look at the deals they’re offering. Don’t be afraid to make a few phone calls and ask some questions – the more information on the different deals you can get the better. Remember that the first thing you’ll be looking for is (of course) value for money, but it’s also worth looking at the reviews of the different companies and seeing what their customer service is like. There won’t be much point in the cheapest gas bill ever if nobody has come round to fix the boiler in the last 5 weeks.

Make sure to ask your landlord about the different providers, too – they will have some working knowledge of the different companies and will know how it all works better than you from years of working with them. Though your landlord’s advice will be good, it’s important that you don’t just do whatever they say; if you’re paying for the bills then you get to choose who you’re paying them to.

It might also be worth visiting your university’s housing department and asking them about the best deals – it’s likely they’ll have a few leaflets lying around somewhere on the subject (these places always do) that might be helpful in making a decision.

Drawing Up A Contract

Before choosing a supplier, it’s always worth trying to get them to reduce their rates by playing the divorced child game (well, this company said they’d do it cheaper, can you do better than that?) and seeing where it gets you – whatever they say, the contracts a provider will be trying to sell you can be changed around. Rates can be reduced, and you will be able to pay for just a few months and not a full year. Don’t be rude to the sales people about it, but make sure they know that you know what you want – it’s their job to make you spend more money, and it should be your job to try to hang onto it.

Make sure there’s no hidden fees involved within the contract like a administration fee for the filing of the contract. If there is, see what you can do to get it waived, even if this sadly turns out to be not-so possible. Expect to pay a little extra the first time you change your providers.

Often some companies will offer package deals to have your electricity and gas in one bundle. This isn’t essential, but it can be very helpful when you’re sharing a house with a few people and don’t want to go through the process of making everybody cough up twice. Just keep it in mind, but don’t feel obligated to take the package if you can get something cheaper for each separately.

Another option well worth considering when living in a shared house is a fixed rate system – where you pay just a certain amount each month instead of paying for what you use. This can often be very helpful; for one thing students tend to use a fair amount of electricity and so it can work out cheaper and for another it will make your number-crunching that much easier each semester. You (and your housemates) will know how much you’ll have to spend each time the bill comes around.

If you’re setting up the contract and working everything out, make sure that it isn’t just your name on the paperwork as this will make you responsible for paying the entire house’s bill. Legally. So whether there’s a house fall-out or somebody can’t cough up the cash one month, you’ll be the one that the energy companies come after. Obviously, this is best avoided, and you should try to get a group-contract deal or something similar. If you tell the providers it’s for a student house they should do that automatically, but if they don’t make sure to ask – it’s just not worth the risk.

Final Thoughts

It’s well worth talking to your landlord about things like energy saving light bulbs and double-glazed windows. Admittedly, one will be a much easier topic to approach than the other but both will help you keep the energy prices down and would be helpful to invest in (or, even better, to get your landlord to invest in). Whatever you do, do your research first and make sure to check all the small print before you sign anything.

This is supposed to be a lengthy article but if you would like the abridged version it can be summarised as this: don’t break stuff. Follow this rule and you’ll probably be fine. But seriously, this is more or less the best advice we can give – just don’t give your landlord or university any reasons to take your deposit. Be respectful to your living environment and you should, generally, be all right.

Your immediate surroundings in your accommodation are your stuff! For the year, at least, so it’s a good idea not to break it. And that’s a Coursefindr life lesson (patent pending) – don’t break your own stuff.

Sometimes, though, your landlord will try to get their hands on your deposit whether you’ve done anything wrong or not. In this case, there’s a few precautions you can take to try to ensure that you don’t lose your hard-earned cash. First and foremost, take pictures of your room before you move in, and make sure to email them to your landlord as soon as possible. In this case, you can make sure that any damage or wearing to the room that was already there won’t end up being put on you in a year’s time.

In the same way, try to document everything that’s even slightly broken in your entire residence before you begin living there. That includes kitchen equipment, furniture, electrical equipment – anything that isn’t yours from when you’ve moved in. It’s not enough to just document it, though – try to get an email from your landlord acknowledging that all of these things have happened before you moved in. If it comes to it (which is unlikely, not every landlord is a robber, and it’s not a good idea to assume your landlord is) you can call on the exchange as proof that the damage wasn’t you. Perhaps even send the list, which we shall name the ‘itinerary’, in a dated letter (keep a copy) and keep proof of postage.

If you do break something whilst you’re living somewhere (and it can happen – living somewhere generally means breaking some stuff somewhere down the line), make sure to let your landlord know and see if you can pay for the damage then and there, if it’s likely to be less than the deposit. For one thing, everyone will respect your honesty, and for another it will simply end up costing you less money. Besides, as we said, not every landlord is out to get you and some will just accept it as general wear-and-tear and won’t bother charging you.

Whatever you do, try not to just fix the damage yourself – we don’t care how you worked as a carpenter once for a week or did art at GCSE – you won’t be able to fix it properly and without your landlord noticing. It’s as simple as that, really – it’s just not going to happen; it’s their house and they will notice if you try to cover something up. And then they’ll charge you as much as they can do for trying to trick them – if you want to pay through the nose for damages, there’s no surer way of doing that then trying to do the repairs yourself. No offence, but you’re not as good at DIY as you think you are.

Make sure to read over your contract thoroughly, and check if there’s a ‘wear and tear’ clause somewhere in there. Quite frankly, there should be – if there isn’t then ask your landlord why there isn’t. It takes a fair bit of confidence to approach your landlord about this kind of stuff, we know (you are living in their house, after all) but this stuff matters and you should approach him or her together as a house to discuss this sort of thing. If you’re unlucky and your landlord is out to squeeze as much money out of you as possible, then you should make sure they know you’re not a pushover. And the way to do that is to ask about things like a wear and tear clause. By the by, in case you haven’t realised already this covers smaller damages that anyone could’ve done and aren’t really anyone’s fault. It’s important to have this one, or you could lose your deposit on something painfully trivial if you’re not careful.

Although, yes, you should make sure your landlord knows you’re not a pushover, you should also endeavour to be respectful and generally friendly to him/her. You’ll get a much better working relationship with them (and it is a working relationship – you’re paying for a service, namely living in their house) if you’re friendly and generally approachable, and it’s a very good idea to not anger the person who decides whether or not you get hot water this week.

If everything does go south, and you end up in the awful situation of having a bad house with a bad landlord and not being able to move out because you’ve signed a year’s contract, then there will be people at your university who should be able to help you out. Often though, landlords will know when they’re being out of line (it is their profession, after all) and will back off a little if you mention taking legal counsel or anything serious along those lines. And just FYI, don’t seek legal counsel – lawyers cost a lot more than student houses and your university will probably be able to help you out a lot more.

So, to summarise, if you want to hang on to your accommodation deposit then be respectful (until you have to be rude), try not to break anything (for your benefit, as well as your landlord’s) and try to make sure there’s a bit of leeway on what counts as ‘breaking something’ (there is a limit, though – a house fire, for example, can never be wear and tear). Do all of this, and you should, generally, be all right. And if that doesn’t work out, talk to the accommodation experts at your university – they probably know a lot more than us. You’re welcome.