Interest rates are up. Here's what you can actually do.

Interest rates are back in the news, and I keep hearing the same question from people: "Right, so when does it get easier?"

The honest answer: not straight away.

What the RBA is actually trying to do

When the Reserve Bank lifts rates, the idea is simple enough. Borrowing costs more, so people spend a bit less. When spending slows across the country, prices stop climbing so fast. Then rates can come back down.

The trouble is the timing. That whole chain takes a while to work through. Rates move today. Your rent, your mortgage repayment and your energy bill feel it almost immediately. The part where prices ease? That comes later, and it arrives slowly.

So most of us sit in the middle of it: higher costs now, relief somewhere down the track.

Rates are a blunt instrument

A rate rise is a big lever pulled for the whole country. It isn't aimed at your kitchen table, and it can't be.

It can't tell the difference between the household that's stretched and the one that's doing fine. And it does nothing about the quiet stuff on your bills: the energy plan you never changed, the internet deal that quietly drifted up, the streaming subscription you forgot about, the gas bill that crept up.

None of that is a rate problem. It's a "nobody's had the time to look at it" problem.

What you can actually move

While the big lever does its slow work, a fair chunk of your budget is still yours to shift:

• Power and gas. Most people are on a plan they haven't looked at in years.
• Internet. The introductory price usually ends and nobody tells you.
• Mobile. Plans drift. Switching, or just asking, often works.
• Subscriptions. Streaming, apps, software, the gym. The ones you half forgot.
• Retention offers. Ring your provider and ask what they'd do to keep you. Often there's something.
• Sign-up bonuses. New plans come with perks most people never claim.

None of that needs a rate cut. It needs an hour and someone who does this for a living.

Where we come in

Send us your bills and we go through them line by line, the big ones and the small ones. A real person checks the report before you see it, and we're paid by you, not the providers. So if a plan is better for you, it makes the list. If it's better for them, it doesn't.

The aim isn't to squeeze a fortune out of anyone. It's to take some of the weight off, so the blunt end of a rate rise doesn't have to change how you live as much.

Have a cuppa and start here

If you'd rather have a crack yourself first, no worries. Do these four:

1. Look up your current energy plan and compare it with what's on offer now.
2. Ring your internet and mobile providers and ask what they'd do to keep you.
3. Go through your subscriptions and cancel the ones you haven't used in a month.
4. Check when your gas discount ends and put it in the calendar.

That's a good afternoon's work, and it usually pays for itself.

We're not a financial adviser and this isn't financial advice. We look at bills and help people find better deals on them. Your situation is your own, so take your time with the big decisions.

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Want a plan? Try our bill shock survival guide for rate rises. Or start small: ask your provider for a retention offer.