How you can slash your bills without turning into a price-comparison nerd

The modern consumer, in theory, is a powerful force, at whose whim big business is at total mercy.

With a handy array of tools and a high-speed internet connection, we perpetually seek out the very best deals, jumping ship the minute we feel we are being taken for a ride.

The theory of the rational consumer has been around for decades. The notion, plainly wrong-headed it seems to me, is that people try to do what is best for themselves.

Bank results this week — we get HSBC today, Lloyds on Wednesday. Barclays on Thursday and RBS on Friday — will again put the lie to this theory.

There is no particularly good reason, certainly not from a rational consumer point of view, for banking with any of these giants. But most of us do.

The banks might have found innovative ways to lose money but they certainly won’t have done so from dealing with us small fry, where the model remains roughly the same as it always has been, the 363 approach. (That means: borrow money at 3%, lend it at 6%, hit the golf course by 3pm).

There is also, if you believe what you read, a perpetual supermarket price war, but even someone who pays as little attention as I do can see that food bills are going one way, and it isn’t downwards.

Even people who like the idea of spending hours on price-comparison websites, a minority interest, are time poor. It takes ages to keep track of new offers and unless you’re a nerd, it’s a very boring process. Not least because you have to check one comparison site against the others.

Power companies lately offer genuinely cheap one-year fixed deals, but once that ends you are switched to the standard variable tariff, which can be up to £400 a year more.

That first-year deal is sometimes a loss leader. They’d claim that’s evidence of a competitive market. I’d say it is something they offer in the certainty that most of us will stop paying attention after that.

In any case, up to 70% of consumers have never switched energy provider, so don’t even get that cheap one-year deal. Broadband companies offer a decent deal for a while, then move you on to something more expensive. In any case, switching broadband companies is less fun than having a wisdom tooth extracted, which is why most of us avoid it.

I think a better explanation of the relationship between large companies and small consumers would be Freddy Krueger, rather than rationality — companies wait until we’re asleep, then rip us off.

Into this misery arrives a ray of hope. Lookaftermybills.com thinks it has the solution and it would be brilliant if it turns out to be right. The idea is a simple one: you dump your household bills with it, it does the price-comparison checking for you and switches you on to better deals. It gets a commission from the deal it finds you; you count your savings.

You have to make some effort to kick-start the process, but far less than you do now.

Henry de Zoete, the co-founder of Look After My Bills, describes the firm as a “wealth manager for the ordinary person”.

“We will be the rational consumer you don’t have the time or know-how to be,” he says.

If it works, you’ll never have to set reminders and alarms telling you when your good deal is coming to an end, because Look After My Bills will do it for you.

Says de Zoete: “People using Look After My Bills can outsource this part of their personal admin forever. So they’re constantly saving and never have to worry about being ripped off again.”

The firm is focussed on energy bills but it will move into other sectors very soon, is the plan.

This is a nascent scheme. It taking off would be a better solution to the Freddy Krueger problem than clunky, government-imposed price caps.

Alternatively, big businesses could just stop treating old customers like flesh to be gouged in the hunt for new ones.

Check bank results this week to gauge chances of this happening.