Happy New Year everyone! I hope your festive period was full of pleasantries, good food, great family and consisted entirely of recharging, relaxing times? (Who am I kidding… let’s be honest, we’re all glad it’s over for another 12 months!).

Every month there are themes to personal finance. March/April time is the period of tax panic, ISA renewals/hunts and other ‘end of the financial year’ matters. But what of January? There is little changing in the UK world beyond the calendar, but it’s the perfect mental incentive time to do some financial ‘spring cleaning’.

1. Review/Amend/Create Household Budget

In the spirit of New Year’s Resolutions, now is the perfect time to be giving the once-over to your finances. What are you paying for that you can cut, reduce, or review? Even if you’re not in debt any money you don’t spend is money that you can save instead. Does your household budget reflect reality, or is it a pipe dream that is summarily ignored 3 days after payday?

2. Haggle With Providers

Paying £50 for Sky when you only watch 5 channels? Do you need the Sports package they enticed you with 3 months ago with the half price offer? Give them a call, route yourself to “If you’re thinking of leaving Sky…” and plead poverty. Get them to remove unnecessary package(s) you may have, and then beg for a reduction in price. You’ll probably get it and save a fortune over the year. If you really watch that little TV, would you do with FreeView? Click here for 5 specific tips to reduce your TV costs.

Do the same with any recurring contract you have. Landline phone, mobile phones, internet access, gym memberships, and so on. Click here for loads of tips on how to haggle!

3. Shop Around

One of the biggest household expenses after rent/mortgage is food. Supermarkets are at war for our custom as they realise the recession is not abating any time soon, and every foot through the door is an important one. Loss leaders are a dime a dozen, and special offers are all over the store.

If you always shop in Waitrose, try Sainsbury’s. Drop down from the ‘Premium’ brand to store’s-own, and stick to your food budget. Shamefully I have gone from spending £600/month on food down to £150-200 just by a little forward planning and spending 5-10 minutes hunting out bargains. Click here for loads more tips on cutting your grocery spending!

4. Check Your Rate – Savings

Are you getting the best your bank or the finance world in general has to offer on your savings account? Barclays lowest rate of interest on their savings accounts is 0.1% when online you can grab a (still pitiful) 1.5% by shopping around. Check your ISA allowance is full for this year (You have until the end of March), and make sure it is paying a decent rate as well.

5. Check Your Rate – Credit

After Christmas is the ‘guilty moment’. If you have overdone the Christmas spending on presents, travel and gastronomy, see if you can’t get a better interest rate or balance transfer deal than you have right now. Many providers at the moment are offering 0% deals that can be yours for the taking, potentially saving you hundreds.

6. Council Tax Money

For the majority of the country, for the next 2 months there won’t be any council tax to pay. Use this money wisely and put it towards your emergency fund rather than spending it on incidentals. It is money that should be in the monthly budget anyway, so won’t be missed.

7. Sell Your Clutter

Has a new 55″ OLED TV replaced your 40″ Plasma? Sell sell sell, on eBay, Friday Ad or any other method. De-clutter your home, your life, and release extra money for debt reduction, savings or other plans!

Good luck, and here’s to your dreams for 2013

This is part 4 of the Meltdown Monday series. You can catch up on part 3 here or start at the beginning with part 1.

I didn’t know it at the time, but organising your finances takes a lot of time and effort. I must have spent at least a week pouring over my bank statements figuring out where all my money was going. I had at least got to grips with who I owed, and how much I owed them. I didn’t know it at the time but this is the very first step to getting out of debt: Know what you owe.

I bumbled along for a few more months. In April I went on holiday to Cyprus with a friend because “I deserved it” and “I needed the break”. Looking back it wasn’t a bad look-after-me decision, but it was a bad money decision. I didn’t spend any money I didn’t already have, but it was money that would have been better put towards my debt. About a week into the holiday I promised myself that the £2,000 I’d likely spend in total was going to be my last conscious bad money decision.

When I returned home, I went spreadsheet crazy. I created a budget based on what I was spending having had my original thought to reduce my outgoings some months before. Then I went to see where I could save even more. By tweaking down the numbers and making myself think that was all the money I had, I started to spend even less. Money freed itself up for more and more debt repayment along the way and I could start to see debt freedom approaching. New Years Day was no longer an unattainable dream but a real possibility.

By the time I’d finished tweaking I had over £1,000 a month appearing as disposable income, based on my net take-home salary. If I stuck to my “do every piece that comes” overtime strategy for the year that would increase significantly. Not bad considering in November and December 2008 I was sinking fast into my overdraft and approaching the hard limit of the bottom.

I learned a few weeks later that my wife had, under the sheer pressure of her debt mountain been declared bankrupt. I suspect at that point my credit rating took a big hit as we were financially linked, courtesy of a joint loan we had taken out when we got married. That had fortunately been settled prior to us parting ways, but I needed to find out how to get the link between us severed before I applied for credit again. In all likelihood I’d get turned down for buying a chocolate bar on credit at this point, nevermind anything bigger.

I had mixed feelings about learning this. As much as I tried to be jubilant or consider it “revenge” as my friends and family encouraged, I couldn’t bring myself to feel that way. I was upset for her and what it meant for her in the long run. Going bankrupt is akin to financial suicide for a minimum of 6 years, and for life in certain respects such as buying a house. I would not wish that on my worst enemy, and certainly not someone I had in the beginning, loved very dearly.

And so we come to ‘now’. It’s approaching the middle of September 2009 and I’m on target for paying off my debt earlier than planned, if all goes well. I have paid off my Egg card entirely and have slightly over £200 remaining on my promotional 0% balance transfer. The loan I took out to replace the others is front-loaded, so I am saving like crazy to pay that off before my big day (in a high interest account of course). My divorce continues to rumble along in the background, rearing its head occasionally, courtesy of solicitor ping-pong.

And Five Pence Piece was born.

I had not intended to start a blog, and indeed didn’t until the middle of last month. I started to really get into some American Personal Finance blogs such as The Simple Dollar, No Credit Needed and Five Cent Nickel. These guys are all dedicated, hard-working folks who not only tell us their stories, their dreams and their hurts, but also try and educate us in the murky, difficult, confusing world that is personal finance. None of them claim to be experts (and none of them are), but they’ve all “been there and done that” and are willing to share their experiences along the way.

I wanted to try and so the same, but provide an insight into a UK journey of debt to prosperity, concentrating on UK products, UK issues and UK services. I want to help fellow British people get out of debt and free themselves from the consumer society we now live in. It’s almost never too late to realise that the things we own do not define who we are; who we are inside defines our outside. I want to be rich, but I know it’s a life-long road to get there and I’m not afraid of the hard work required.

As I say at the foot of every page on this site: Live according to your means, not up to your expectations.

You’re welcome to join me on my journey.

I’ll be honest when I make a mistake, to save you from making the same one. When I find a product, service or strategy that is useful, I’ll share it.  As you can probably tell from this series of posts, my first tip is contained within. Family finances should be discussed openly, honestly, and jointly. Agreement must be reached that both partners can live by.

If you’re not honest with each other then any relationship is destined to fail before it even gets going.

Did you enjoy reading this series? Did it teach you anything? I’d be pleased to engage you in the comments.

You may have heard the hype about reclaiming bank charges on the news, in the papers, or online over the last year or so. If you’re in debt, have been in debt, and are either currently struggling to repay what you owe, or simply afford to live in general, now is the perfect time to reclaim every penny. Those suffering financial hardship are exempt from the current legal wrangling hold, and can reclaim immediately.

Financial Hardship covers a multitude of things from not being able to repay your debts, not being able to get out of your bank charge spiral, or simply not having enough money for reasonable living expenses. Whatever your financial situation, if you’re struggling in any way, it’s worth putting the effort in. You could get thousands of pounds in return.

It might seem (it certainly feels) like a bit of a cop out, but rather than reinvent the wheel on this subject, let me simply point you to Martin Lewis’ Bank Charges Reclaim Guide. He’s done the painstaking research and initial legwork, and even has template letters you can send to your banks to get you going. The BBC also has a step-by-step guide with template letters you can use. As a last resort, a web search for ‘reclaim bank charges‘ (Google) will reveal a slew of companies that’ll do all the work for you, in return for a percentage of your payout.

You can do this for Credit Cards too. How many times have you been stung for paying late, or going over your credit limit over the years? If your answer is ‘too many’, then get reclaiming these fees. Reclaiming won’t affect your credit score, but don’t be surprised if the card company decides they no longer want your business afterwards. You need to weigh up the positives of getting cash back versus the possible negative of having a credit line closed on you.

Still want to give it a go? It applies equally to open and closed accounts, so tackle your closed account charges first if you know of any. That way you get all the positives, without the possibility of closure. There is a ready-to-go guide on this matter as well from Martin Lewis, which you can access here.

Have you had your charges back? Share your experience in the comments below.