Every Friday I publish “Frugal Friday!“, an open-ended series with some of the simple and best ways to really save you money both now and in the future.

This week I am concentrating on cutting down the costs associated with owning your car. Nearly everyone has one, nearly everyone needs one, and nearly everyone pays more than they need to for the privilege.

Cut Your Insurance Costs

Get Comprehensive Cover

Despite the lesser cover that third-party insurance provides, unbelievably the quotes are usually more expensive than if you had taken out comprehensive cover in the first place.

Shop Around

Always shop around for your insurance using price comparison websites to see how the quotes come up (GoCompare, MoneySupermarket, Confused, Compare The Market). Phone your present insurer and see if they can beat it if you’re otherwise happy with the service they provide. Remember, not all insurance providers are on price comparison websites (such as Direct Line), so be sure to get separate quotes from them as well.

Pay In Full

It may seem convenient to your budget to pay over 10 or 12 months, but invariably you will be stung by the company for doing so, as in effect they are loaning you the money to get the policy. APR’s range from 15-30% for this ‘privilege’, so if you can always always always pay for your policy in one go.

This has the advantage that if your vehicle is written off in an accident, you do not continue paying for car insurance on a car you no longer even own.

Up Your Excess

If you are not already penalised for being a young or inexperienced driver, then up your excess (deductable). The quotes vary wildly when you change your excess from £100 to £500. Be  sure you will be able to access such an amount in the event you need to make a claim though, as this will instantly be taken out of any payout you get. Any claims under your excess you will be expected to meet in full.

Drive Carefully

Hopefully this one is obvious, but if you drive like Jensen Button but on the M3 rather than Silverstone, you will end up having an accident, getting stopped by the police or if really unlucky, both at once. Not only do insurance claims knock up your costs, but so do points on your driving license.

Play With Your Job Title

I am not suggesting outright fraud here, but there is no escaping the fact the work you do has a very real impact on the cost of your premium. Martin Lewis over at Money Saving Expert has put together a job title picker to see if you could save money by tweaking your job title. Remember the general rule of thumb: If a family friend would agree on the spot that is a reasonable job title for the work you do, it is reasonable to give it to the insurance company. Don’t outright lie though, if the company finds out during a claim you could find your cover nullified.

Purchase via a Cashback Site

Once you have found a quote you are happy with, see if you can get the same quote again but via a Cashback site. You could find an insurer paying you £25-£150 for taking out their cover in doing so! Check out the CashBack Optimiser to see which site pays the most for the company you’re looking at.

Cut Your Fuel Costs

Shop Around

Just as I advocate shopping around for your insurance, shop around for your fuel as well. Costs in a 10 mile radius can vary by as much as 15 pence a litre, so it pays to spend a moment to check PetrolPrices.com and see who is charging what today before you go fill up. The site requires registration but is completely free.

Do Not Fill Up

Unless you have a long journey ahead, do not fill your tank right up. If you want to be really frugal, don’t go much beyond half a tank at any one time. Fuel is heavy, and your engine will have to work harder to move the car and its contents around the more it weighs. This tip won’t make you rich overnight, but over the course of the lifetime of the car, it could save you hundreds of pounds.

Empty The Boot

If your vehicle is anything like mine, the boot becomes a storage cupboard over time. Anything not immediately required seems to end up in it somehow. In much the same way as the extra fuel weight means less miles per gallon, so does the extra weight of the rubbish in your boot. Keep it regularly spring-cleaned, and only carry around what you really need day-to-day. Every additional 50kg of weight you carry in your car increases fuel consumption by an average of 2%.

Take Your Foot off the Pedal

Simply driving a little more efficiently can add up to 25 more miles per gallon of fuel! If your tank holds 13 gallons, that is possibly upwards of an extra 250 miles per tank. Anticipate traffic flows, look further ahead than you normally would, and knock some speed off your clock. Posted speeds are maximum limits, not targets.

Consider a Cash Back Credit Card

Citi offer a Shell-branded MasterCard that pays 1.5% back on the price of your petrol if you fill up in a Shell garage. This used to be 3% and much more worthwhile, but you may now find simply shopping around saves you more over the long term.

AMEX offer a Platinum Cashback credit card with a whopping 5% introductory cashback rate, but this also drops to between 0.75% and 1.5% over the long term.

Finally Egg Money offers 1% cashback but unless you spend considerably on it throughout the year, the £12 annual fee will eat into any cashback you earn, making the card uneconomical for anyone but the higher spenders.

If you choose to go for a cashback card, remember to pay off the balance in full every month. The APR of these cards will stunningly dwarf any return you could have expected from the cashback.

Keep it Serviced

A well looked after engine, is a happy fuel efficient engine. Change the oil regularly, change the oil and fuel filters and clean or replace the air filter regularly and in any case within the servicing schedule of the manufacturers handbook. Always look online for promos or specials on auto maintenance.

Keep Them Inflated

A tyre just a few PSI short of its target starts to lose efficiency. A 5 PSI drop can see the drag increase by as much as 4%, and this increases the work your engine has to do to keep you rolling. It will also start to damage the tyre and cause uneven wear, making it unsafe over the long term and also speed up the replacement schedule biting your wallet.

Turn The Air Conditioning Off

AirCon increases your petrol consumption by as much as 10 per cent – so if it is only a little warm, put the fan on or wind down your window. That said, if you are travelling over 60mph then having the window down increases drag which increases your fuel consumption – so air conditioning would be better. Better yet, keep below 60mph and keep the window open!

Other Cost-Saving Ideas

Wash At Home

Taking your vehicle through the car wash may save time, but at £5 a go for a decent one, it is not cheap. It will also likely start damaging or scratching your paintwork, only do half a job on your alloys and cover your windscreen in wax. For the sake of an hour on a weekend, it is far cheaper to do it yourself. Even if you want to buy brand-name goods to do it with, it will work out considerably less than £5 per wash. If you are content with a bucket of soapy water then you may as well put the whole £5 back in your pocket.

Avoid Dealer Servicing

If your vehicle is outside of its warranty period, avoid the dealership like the plague. An independent garage will likely do the same or better work for half the price. Case in point: My Ford dealership charges £125 for an oil and filter change. KwikFit do the same for £25, and my local garage charges £19.50. All use the same parts and oil, and the cheapest one also had me back on the road in the shortest amount of time.

Downsize

If it has come the time to replace your old banger with something a bit more modern, consider going smaller. A smaller vehicle will be more efficient, generally cost less to insure, and cost less time to wash as well.

Avoid Financing A New Car

Aside from the fact brand new cars lose value the moment you drive them off the forecourt (as much as 20% in some cases), if you have bought it on finance you could be making it much more expensive in the long run. See my own story on doing this, as it effectively doubled the cost of my car over the 6 years.

And the Biggest Saving?

Use your car less. This does not mean don’t use it where doing so would be useful, but if you can, combine your journeys into one and spend a moment planning out the most efficient route to do everything you need to do without driving along the same bit of road three or four times.

If you are just “popping down the shop” and the weather is pleasant, grab your bike or take a walk instead. Short journeys are arguably the most fuel-expensive, and if you can cut them out you will be well on your way to cutting your annual vehicle costs.

Anything I missed? Come help out in the comments.

This is part 3 of the Meltdown Monday series. You can catch up on part 2 here.

My solicitor (it still feels weird saying that) gave me a bit of a grilling about my personal finances, and how stupid I’d been to have been taken for such a ride in the first place. I think he felt sorry for me in a way, and I’m glad he said what he did. I walked out of his office very depressed, but inside me something clicked. I suddenly became very determined to beat my debt situation and turn my life around. I’ve since discovered this is commonly termed your ‘Light-Bulb Moment‘, particularly by the folks over at the money forum I frequent.

When I got home, my drive was still there to do it. I went over my bank statements again, except this time concentrating on my own spending; Every month there was hundreds of pounds of unnccessary spending of my own doing on there. Expensive organic food shopping, premium diesel, takeaways, gadgets, insurances and more. I was also paying off 2 credit cards and 3 personal loans with wildly varying interest rates, so I needed to work out what I owed and to whom. I worked up a spreadsheet (budget) of my essential spending, and vowed to cut out everything else, trying desperately to spend less than I earned. I drastically cut spending even on essentials: my food shopping allowance to myself dropped from an average of £300 a month down to just £50, my diesel average spend had to drop from £250 as that was an insane amount of money just to spend on getting to work and back.

Then, it was time to attack my debts.

One credit card I’d ignored for the best part of 3 years: it refused to work in the petrol station one morning and I buried my head in the sand from that point onwards. I assumed that as I was paying upwards of £100+ a month on it, the balance must be shrinking. Instead – after biting the bullet, phoning them and resetting my access details for online banking – it turned out I was over my credit limit and had been incurring £16 fees every month for the privilege for the last 3 years! I was also paying interest on these fees every month, so my balance was going up not down, despite my payments. £120 was taken automatically from me every month, but after £90 interest was added, £20 Payment Protection added, and then a £16 fee on top,  my monthly repayments were not touching the balance at all.

Despite this, my credit rating was still good. I arranged an appointment at my bank with a financial adviser and went down with my tail between my legs a few days later in the frigid January morning air. I’ve been with my bank since I was 12, and I honestly believe in this instance, loyalty paid off. I explained my circumstances, was brutally honest, and despite the bank earning loads off me, the lady I saw was keen to help me. She consolidated my existing loans (one at 19% APR, the other at 12% APR) into one loan at a much more preferable 8%, and said I was also showing as pre-approved for the Barclaycard Platinum card that carried a 15 month 0% balance transfer for new customers. She said it was unlikely I’d get a great initial credit limit due partly to policy and partly my existing credit commitments, but anything would be better than nothing for transfer purposes. She also made a point of saying that I shouldn’t be tempted to spend on the card, as despite it having 0% on new purchases for 3 months, the terms of the card meant my balance transfer would be paid first, meaning I’d be stung for interest on the purchases all the while any transfer remained.

Honest advice from a bank – how terribly refreshing!

I walked out instantly having saved £55 a month in loan repayments, and shaved 12 months off the term. Even better was the payment holiday the loan gave me to begin with; 2 months with nothing to pay. I needed this, as it helped me work out where I was without worrying I would end up in my overdraft again.

Shortly thereafter my new credit card arrived with a £1,000 limit. Not great, but £1,000 at 0% is better than £1,000 at 16.9%, so I transferred what I could off my old card onto the new one, and planned to pay off the remainder as quickly as I could. The other credit card I paid off and closed instantly, as it had a surprisingly low balance already. I upped my automatic payment to £400 every month, and made an immediate one-off payment to get me just under my credit limit again to stop the charges. For the first time in 3 years, my credit card balance would reduce on the next payment!

I felt terribly alone at this point. Despite having a good relationship with my family, it’s not a topic I personally feel comfortable discussing with them in great detail. I wanted to feel part of a group in my fight, and to know I wasn’t alone. I mentioned debt to a trusted friend at work and he introduced me to Money Saving Expert (or ‘MSE’ to its friends). The website is a goldmine of information, but the forums are the real feature; Thousands of helpful people from all industries, sectors and walks of life combine together to cut bills, reduce outgoings, help the environment, help each other and play big corporations at their own games. I was hooked instantly – I felt like I belonged – and with their help, I planned my way out of debt for good.

Quite arbitrarily, I set my Debt Free Day as New Years Day 2010. I knew I would struggle to meet that goal, and struggle a lot. I owed £16,000 (if I included my overdraft), or potentially £20,000 (if I include my projected divorce cost), but the difficulty of it is in part why I chose it. I work best under pressure, and it was a significant date, too. It was almost exactly a year after I moved out of my old home and back in with my parents, and it also signified a new beginning: A new year, a new decade, and a new, debt-free me.

Since that moment, I have been working every possible hour of overtime humanly possible, and saving every penny after paying off my debts according to my own plan.

Continue to Part 4…

Up to the point that my life began to change for the worse, I had never considered the worth of debt. Sure, like everyone else I’d felt the consequences of debt: less disposable income; having to work harder just to stay stationary; and the niggling feeling of not quite owning whatever I was supposed to actually be enjoying. But did I ever stop to consider whether debt was worth all that?

Of course not. Debt is just the way our society works. We want things now, and we have them now. Does it matter if we might still be paying premium, hard-earned pounds for them long after they’ve depreciated to the point of being worth a fraction of their purchase price (in the case of cars, for example)? Does it matter that the high spec laptop you got on a 4 year finance deal 3 and half years ago is now just decidedly average, but you are unable to afford to upgrade it because you’re still paying premium for the old one? Does it matter that those home improvements you put on the credit card a year ago with the intention of paying it off in a month or so are still around, costing you hundreds in interest payments? Are you enjoying those improvements, or are they feeling like an elephant tied round your neck?

By and large, I’ve come to the conclusion that yes it matters, and no, debt isn’t worth it.

You can have all these things without the debt negatives by putting the cash you’d pay the finance company in your own savings account. Overpay yourself, make micropayments, work a little extra overtime here and there. If you want it enough, then pay with your own cold hard cash and not somebody elses. That new laptop or car is yours. You own it, and you won’t be making payments on it for the next year or some multiple thereof.

Of course, this isn’t always possible, but by and large it should be your first option before reaching for the credit monster.

Sounds a little preachy doesn’t it? But it makes sense. It also makes you double-check yourself. Buying things on credit is easy, and deliberately so. It’s just £50 a month here, £125 there. But these regular increased outgoings month in, month out, quickly make you poor. When you come to part with your own money though, take that 10-second pause and consider “do I really want this?” or could you make do with something a little cheaper? Do you need it at all, or is it a pure want? If after that 10 second introspection you still want to do it – go ahead. You need it, you earned it, you get it.

There are scenarios where debt can be worth it. Few people can afford to buy a house right out. Sure, a mortgage costs you a fortune over the term, but you get your home out of it. Outside of this realm, I still struggle to convince myself that debt is worth the price it requires anymore.

And I don’t just mean monetary.