Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset

is a charity set up to promote car clubs so its numbers aren’t exactly unbiased, but I don’t think they are that far out either. Car clubs aren’t a perfect replacement for owning your own car (there is the inconvenience of having to walk to a nearby parking bay to pick up your car rather than having it waiting for you directly outside your door) but, given the savings on offer, they’re a pretty good one. Car clubs include www.citycarclub.co.uk and www.mystreetcar.co.uk.

       Cutting utility bills

      These, like many money-related things, are boring but very important. Unlike many of our expenses utility bills are not optional. We all have to pay for our water, electricity and gas. Worse, the cost of making these payments has been soaring for three years as water shortages have kicked in and energy prices have been rising: gas bills have jumped an average of 39% since 2003 and electricity bills are up nearly 30% over the same time period. All this makes it very important to use the cheapest possible supplier. To find out if you are doing so visit one of the price comparison websites such as www.uswitch.com, www.energyhelpline.co.uk or www.simplyswitch.co.uk. Uswitch claims that the average household can save £140 a year on its energy bills by switching supplier. One of my friends, on a saving binge after the birth of her first baby, estimates that she has cut £250 off her family’s annual utility bills since she spent an hour on uswitch.com changing all her suppliers.

      You should also take a look at your water bills. If you live alone or don’t use much water (perhaps you don’t have a garden) you are probably paying too much and may find it worth your while to ask your water company to fit your house with a meter so instead of paying an average tariff you simply pay for the water you use. If you live in a block of flats or somewhere else where it is not possible to get a meter fitted ask to start paying the Average Household Charge instead of the usual charge based on the rateable value of your house. This can often provide hundreds of pounds of savings a year. I moved on to it a few years ago when I was living alone and using very little water (I was showering at the gym and was hardly ever home) yet paying the same water bills as the four people living in the flat above who appeared to do nothing but play in the bathroom. My bills were immediately halved.

      You might also consider going green to save money on energy. Switching off everything in the house that is on standby will save you considerable amounts (at the moment the government estimates that appliances left on standby cost a total of £740 million a year), but you might save even more by switching to a renewable energy provider such as Ecotricity. Check this on www.uswitch.com.

      Ensuring that you are paying as little as possible for your phone is another way to cut your spending easily. More than a third of UK fixed telephone lines are now with a non-BT supplier and the tough competition in the market means that prices have tumbled. Again, visit the price comparison websites to see if you can change suppliers and cut your costs. You should do the same with your mobile phone. Altogether we spend £25 billion a year on our phones but we could probably spend rather less if we shopped around a bit before we signed up to our contracts. According to another comparison website, Onecompare.com, the average person could shave £210 off the cost of their mobile by switching firms. More than half of mobile users have never switched firms and are therefore on uncompetitive deals or on the wrong deal for them: the mobile phone companies have a splendid racket going whereby they create very cheap packages that include a certain number of texts or call minutes, persuade us they are good value and then once we’ve taken them out (without reading the small print) charge us a fortune for making more calls or sending more texts than we are allowed to under the contract. Finally, you might consider signing up to Internet telephony with one of the many firms that now offer it such as Tesco, BT or Skype. They all offer prices significantly lower than landline or mobile prices.

       Flashy furniture at a discount

      The sofa market is an extraordinary thing. There seems to be a sofa shop on every corner of every street in every town in the UK and half the advertising time on evening television appears to be taken up with adverts for various unattractive sofas from dfs. An alien landing on the average high street would think we were nothing but a nation of sofa addicts, a people who just can’t walk 20 yards in an urban environment without popping into a shop for a new piece of furniture to lounge about on. I don’t get this (there is only one sofa in my – admittedly small – house and I’ve had it for seven years), but more than that I don’t get why, if you must buy sofas and the like, you would pay the full list price for them on the high street when you can buy at an out-of-town warehouse at a 50% discount. Sofas (like cars) become second-hand and hence verging on worthless as soon as you take them out of the showroom, so it makes sense to pay as little as possible for them.

      Good news, then, that warehouses have been springing up all over the country selling end-of-line pieces, oversupply and bits of furniture no longer needed in show homes. The Showroom Warehouse, about an hour and a half up the M1 from London (www.showhomewarehouse.co.uk), is one good place to look. It contains the entire contents from show homes around the country priced at a half to a quarter of their original price. This is a great place to buy almost-new furniture at major discounts, although you should always bear in mind that to make the rooms look bigger ex-show-home furniture is often designed to be smaller than normal furniture (take this into account if you are thinking of buying a new-build house or flat too). This is particularly the case with beds so test before you buy. Trade Secret (www.trade-secret.co.uk) is another place to try (it specializes in discounted brand-name furniture at around 50%) as is You’re Furnished in Essex (01279 870036), which specializes in selling top-quality bathrooms and kitchens at major discounts.

      It isn’t that much hassle to seek out this kind of place and the savings can be huge; if you are looking at the sort of kitchen that might usually come in at £10,000 but get it for £5,000 at a warehouse, any research and travelling you might have to do along the way is going to be well worth the effort. Another plus point of these outlets is that at most of them what you see is what you leave with – there is none of the absurd nonsense you get in high street shops of having to wait 6–8 weeks for your new piece of furniture to be delivered to you. See www.homesandbargains.co.uk for more places to pick up discounted furniture.

       Big designers at small prices

      There’s no more reason to pay retail prices for designer clothes than there is for sofas. In fact these days you shouldn’t ever have to pay retail. There are a hundred ways to buy the same clothes the uninformed and lazy are paying fortunes for in department stores and boutiques for a fraction of the price. You can, for example, visit a branch of TK Maxx (I go to the one in Hammersmith, London but there are branches everywhere – see www.tkmaxx.co.uk for locations). TK Maxx fills its stores by buying in stock at cost from designers who have cash-flow problems or who have ended the season stuck with too much inventory and then adds a small margin. The result is prices that end up more than 50% less than they might be elsewhere. I do much of my Christmas shopping at TK Maxx every year. The only problem I have is maintaining a degree of discipline so I don’t end up spending hundreds of pounds on things that weren’t on my list in the first place.

      Otherwise you can visit designer warehouse sales where and when you can (see www.dwslondon.co.uk for details of sales in London where you can get up to 80% off clothes and www.bdbinvite.com for an invitation to the Billion Dollar Babes designer sample sales), or apply for tickets for the sales after fashion week when designers sell off their samples cheap to the general public after the fashion press and department store buyers have seen them (see www.londonfashionweekend.co.uk).