The quickest way to save a lot of money is to assess your biggest expenses and see how you can reduce them. It is estimated that most people who haven’t spent any time trying to find the best deals for their big expenses could save over £4000 a year by doing so. For the average UK resident that would be the same as a 25% pay rise. You wouldn’t go turning that down would you! For most people their biggest expense is their mortgage so that is where we will start. Do you know if you are on a standard variable mortgage? If you are then ask yourself why, as on a typical mortgage on a £150,000 house this could be costing you over £2500 too much a year. You should look at switching to a fixed rate or tracker mortgage where you can typically get a reduction of around 2% on the standard variable rate. It is easy to do and you may not have to even move provider.

Next up is bank accounts, most current accounts pay virtually no interest on the money you have in them. Banks have now started offering high interest current accounts with interest rates of over 5% in some cases. If you have £1000 in a high interest account rather than a normal current account you could be earning an extra £50 a year. If you have a personal loan you could easily be paying 11% whereas the best rates are now about 6.8%, so on a £5000 loan you would be paying £100 more. We all have credit cards but if you have a £3000 debt on one this will cost about £450 a year in interest. Move this to a card with a 0% balance transfer rate and you can make another big saving. There may be a transfer fee up front of up to £100 but over a year it still leaves you much better off. Even if you don’t have debt on your credit card you could choose one with 0% on purchases for a year and save money. If you put the money you would use to pay off the card each month in a high interest savings account you could save £300 a year if you spend about £400 a month on the card.

Shopping around for you house, car and life insurance can save you more again. Most people who have been with their current providers for a number of years could save about £700 by switching to the best deals available. This is reasonably easy to do using one of the many comparison sites to find you the best on offer. If you aren’t already on a duel fuel tariff for your gas and electric you are definitely missing out. You could save £200 on average by moving to one. Again the comparison sites can pick the best deals based on your usage. You should also look at your telephone and broadband packages. There are many combined deals now that can save you over £50 a year.

Making all these changes will take a bit of time and you need to make sure you aren’t tied in to any of your existing deals. You could end up eating in to the savings if you have penalty clauses for ending the deals early. If you have checked this and you haven’t already shopped around then what are you waiting for, start saving.