Speak to an Electricity Bid Energy Consultant in Tyler Texas to Find a Low Deposit Option For Electric Service
Electricity Bid can be reached at 1-800-971-4020
When relocating into a new place in Tyler Texas especially if you are a young person you may get hit with several deposit requests. Anything from your apartment, water utilities, to electric service will be essential services that will want some type of deposit. If you have good credit you may not be asked for a deposit at all but for young people, those with no credit history, and people with bad credit you will definitely be asked for a deposit. The larger deposits are usually with your electricity service company and your landlord. The electric company will want something in the range of $400 and the apartment, home, or duplex rental will usually need anywhere from 1 to 3 months rent up front.
Finding a Tyler Texas electricity provider that will ask you for zero deposit requires that your credit score be in the neighborhood of 700 and no late payments with any companies or utilities past 30 days. If you have maxed out any credit cards lately this will drop your credit score by as much as 50 points. If you have paid off a collections agency lately you may find that your credit score has dropped another 100 points. If you have had a 700 credit score in the past you may be surprised to find that your score can drop very quickly for some strange reasons. One of the strangest ways your credit score can go down is by paying off your credit card balance in full. It is best to leave a small balance on all of your credit cards to maintain a good credit score. This may sound strange but to credit scoring companies it simply shows them that you can afford to have multiple credit lines you can pay off.
So how do you avoid that $400 deposit a Texas electric company may be asking you for? There used to be more then a few electricity providers in Texas that offered a prepaid electricity service. These pay as you go electric service companies in Tyler seem to come and go. Right now there are only a couple and their names are DPI Electric and Freedom Power. Some of the other prepay electric companies in Tyler that used to be around have gone out of business because of bad execution and PUCT and ERCOT penalties associated with disconnecting non paying customers before giving proper notice.
Pre pay electricity providers have to abide by strict PUCT rules that require them to send out post cards or letters giving proper notice that a non paying customer will be disconnected if they do not pay their bill. In the case of prepaid electricity service your bill is not for electricity already used but for future electric service you will use. So how does a prepaid electric company determine what you will pay? Pay as you go electric service companies in Tyler TX will estimate your usage by using the historical usage from the previous tenant at your address. So if you are a conservative electric service customer that tries to not use that much energy you may still have to pay a $300 a month electricity bill. The reason you have to pay more than what you use is because they are billing you for someones elses electric usage from the previous year.
This old usage billing is the only cost effective way for prepaid electric providers to operate in Texas. To avoid additional profit loss a pay as you go energy service provider will inflate their electric rate dramatically. If the going cheap electricity rate is 10 cents per kWh with TXU or Reliant you can bet that a prepaid electricity company will want something more in the neighborhood of 17 cents per kWh. These higher electric rates will cause you to come up with about the same or more in electricity service prepay charges as you would have originally paid as a deposit to a traditional electric company.
Our recommendation is to avoid going with a pay as you go electric company in Tyler Texas. Since you will have to come up with about the same amount of money to pay a prepay company as would to pay your initial deposit it makes more sense to come up with that deposit amount. For $400 or less that you will get back at the end of your electric service term you will be able to sign up with a traditional electricity company like TXU, Just Energy, Bounce Energy, Reliant, Ambit or someone else and will be able to be on a cheap rate based on your actual usage. Sure you may have to pay a $400 deposit but your first months electricity bill may only be $100. If you add your first months electric bill to the deposit amount you get $500. Now imagine you are charged by a prepaid Tyler Texas electricity company, you will likely be charged $300 – $500 for your first month. You will never get this money back as this is not a deposit but the actual cost of your electricity usage.
As you can see although you may put off having to pay a large dollar amount for a month you will end up having to pay close to the same amount in actual electric usage charges. We do not believe a Tyler TX prepaid electric company that offers a rate with no deposit is really a good situation for a Tyler TX resident. If you are low income than you will have a really big problem when you get your first months electricity bill. The pay as you go electric companies will usually hook you in to an electricity rate by offering you an option to get started with only $99. The problem is they haven’t charged you for the first month but only a small portion of your total bill for the first month. A few weeks later they may ask you for $300 more dollars to continue to keep your Tyler TX electricity service on.
So be sure to compare traditional electricity companies in Tyler TX rather than pay as you go providers. You will save a lot of money by not falling for the hook of “$99 to get started” pitch line. These prepaid electricity companies tend to go out of business as well which means you will end up having to shop for a new electric company anyway. If you have questions about any of this we recommend you speak with someone from locally owned Electricity Bid at 1-800-971-4020. One of their Tyler TX energy consultants will be able to assist you in shopping for a cheap electric company with a low deposit option.
To read about this topic from a Mexican American perspective visit our no deposit Tyler Texas electricity and utilities (no hay electricidad depósito Tyler Texas y los servicios públicos) article written by a local Mexican American living in Tyler TX.
