Helping you keep your finances healthy!

Feeling a bit hard up? Along with the rest of us?
Despite the lowest mortgage rates in a generation, many of us are still pinned down by high monthly mortgage repayments – or otherwise feeling the pinch.

Dealing with out-of-control credit card balances used to be relatively simple. You’d swear an oath to stop spending, carve up your old credit card and apply for a new balance transfer card to clear your debts.

According to David Hynam, Chief Executive of Friends Life, recent research shows that the “coping classes”, those earning between £20 and £50,000 , feel disproportionately affected by public sector job cuts and have adopted a new attitude to debt.

Living with debt has become as much an accepted part of modern life in the UK as mobile phones, high house prices and fake tan. All of which might indirectly be contributing to the piles of debt we have stashed away.

So when you have a luxury to buy, do you: a) put it on the credit card, or b) save up for it?
 
Frances Coulson, vice-president of insolvency trade body R3, believes the answer should be firmly b). She says “saving, rather than borrowing, to pay for luxuries is the best way to avoid a life dogged by financial problems.”
 
Today, we take a look at ways of getting off the borrowing track and making saving a habit instead.

Debt consolidation loans have come under fire, and understandably so. We’ve seen daytime characters such as Carol Vorderman advertise debt consolidation loans to anyone with a poor credit history, and heard the reports of misleading sales and the potential true cost. However in the right circumstances, and with correct expectations, it’s not necessarily a bad [...]