Why we need to bust the loyalty tax … one day at a time

With so many days and even weeks assigned to marking worthy causes it’s fair enough to ask why do we need a loyalty tax day?

For one there’s more than 11 billion reasons representing the bucks we could all save if we compared the providers of essential services and moved to better deals.

Then there’s yet another price of old age creeping on. For each decade older we become we are 11% less likely to switch. We end paying real extra money for by being rusted onto uncompetitive offers.

For 24 hours this Thursday Nov 26 dawns Australia’s first ever attempt to encourage consumers to focus on reviewing and if worth it switching their energy, insurance, banking and other bills.

We’ve called the extra $3,300 a year the typical household pays by NOT taking up more competitive home loans, credit cards etc the loyalty tax.

Others have styled this impost, which you can quite legally evade and avoid by shopping around, the lazy tax suggesting it’s the cost of inaction and inertia.

We prefer to question the cost of loyalty as opposed to accusing others of laziness because it’s more likely to drive action.

The whole idea of the FiftyUp Club is taking actions together or aggregating our consumer power.

As individuals we don’t have much bargaining power with the power companies and other providers but when you are with 130,000 FiftyUp members they do tend to take notice.

One suggestion to help us turn our intentions to save money into some resolve to find and then switch to better providers has inspired our day of action to level the loyalty tax.

We want you to focus along with other members on what you can save. Fill in the loyalty tax test to discover what you might be paying and   get some tips on how to save it.

In the UK they’ve suggested an Active Consumer Week in January so the public only have to think about it once a year in a burst of activity.

The concept, which would require firms to contact their customers with better offers if they had them, might even have legs in Australia.

But all good ideas start small so we have for this year at least settled on a single day to potentially follow some tips and start your switching journey.