So the Christmas tree and decorations are down, you have cleared away all that drink from new year, well what is left of it anyway (!) and made your new years resolutions… then the credit card bill comes in! Panic!

Did you really need to buy all that? Did you treat yourself too much? Maybe it is time to re-think your finances.

Tighten Your Belt via Kenteegardin

January is the perfect time to look at your finances and reorganise your bank accounts. But where to start – with a budget.

Make a list…
Sit down with your bank statements and work out what all your bills are when it all comes out. Include everything from the high importance things like your mortgage/rent, council tax, motor insurance etc, to the smaller things like your mobile phone contract and your DVD rental.

…check it twice
Once you have written down what  is coming out, how much and when it will come out, you need to workout if you can afford it all on your income. If you can’t afford it all, cut out what you don’t need and shop around for a cheaper deal on those things you can’t do without. Then once you have done all that, see what you have left. Work out what you need on a daily basis and what you want to save.

Now, give yourself a pat on the back! It’s never nice to do a budget but you will feel cleansed and ready to start the new year afresh once you know what money you do have.

Streamline your bank accounts
The next job is to re-evaluate your bank accounts. You need to work out which accounts aren’t working for you and which you simply don’t need any more. Do you have savings accounts which just have peanuts in them – get rid! Look at all your credit cards and shop cards, yes all of them, and decide what you will and won’t use. There is no point in lowering your credit rating on having too many cards you just aren’t using any more.

Then look to see if there is another current account or savings account which is giving you more benefits or interest, it is always best to check you have the best deal out there.

Sensible shopping
Finally, start practising some new shopping techniques. Try the two week rule, as recommended by Career-Success-for-Newbies.com. The rule is designed to stop you from buying unnecessary impulse buys. The idea is that if you see something you want to buy, wait two weeks and if you are still really keen to get it, then go for it, treat yourself, if not then think of the money you’ve saved! Other ideas are shopping with a list or a time restriction to stop you buying things you don’t need.

Get a helping hand
It’s important to maintain a healthy personal wealth management as you need to ensure you are not over spending and saving where you can, especially in these tough times. There are great online tools for managing your personal finances and even more support if you are struggling. The main idea is to live within your means and treat yourself every so often!

Have you thought about reorganising your finances after the festive period? What are you going to do to save the pennies? Tell us in the comments below.

Image: Lamiavitadimerda ®'s

The National Union of Students has revealed, through an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast programme, that, alarmingly, an increasing number of students in England are turning to prostitution to fund their way through higher education.

Speaking on the programme, Estelle Hart, the NUS’s national women’s officer, said:

“In an economic climate where there are very few jobs, where student support has been massively cut, people are taking more work in the informal economy, such as sex work.”

She also said:

“It’s all dangerous unregulated work, simply so people can stay in education.”

The shocking revelations come amid ongoing criticisms of the amount of money students are expected to pay to see themselves through higher education in England.

Whilst it’s easy to dismiss the claims as sensationalistic, it’s worth considering research that the University of Kingston published last year, which showed that the number of university students who knew someone who had worked in the sex industry to fund their studies had dramatically shot up from 3% to 25% over the last decade.

Sarah Walker, of the English Collective of Prostitutes, which runs a helpline for women within the industry, claimed that the volume of students getting in touch with them had doubled within the last twelve months. Whilst the figure had been growing gradually over the last decade, they claim to have received a record number of calls since the government’s announcement that English universities could begin to charge up to £9000 a year for tuition fees from next year.
Walker said:

“They (ministers) know that the cuts they’re making are driving women into things like sex work. It’s a survival strategy so we would hold the government responsible for that.”

Further instances have since emerged with one student claiming that she turned to escorting to get through her A-levels after her Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was cut.

A spokesman speaking on behalf of the Department for Education claimed that they are doing what they can to support students financially:

“We are targeting £180m a year financial support at the most vulnerable 16 to 19-year-olds to help them continue their studies – with transitional funding for the students who were getting the top rate of EMA and part way through their studies.”

Adding:

“It is down to schools and colleges themselves to award bursaries to young people who need the most help. If students are really struggling financially, they need to speak directly to their tutors.”

What should the Government be doing to financially safeguard a young person’s education? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

Image by: rinkjustice

The majority of us will at some point have come up short money wise at least once in our life. It may have been an unexpected bill or expense that put you off your budget but how did you handle it? There appears to be a worrying growth in the number of businesses offering payday loans.

Payday loans are loans meant for the short term, you can usually borrow a couple of thousand with a lower number of checks and have the money in your account within fifteen minutes. Now this all sounds too good to be true. That is because it is. There is a real worry that people are turning to these payday loans as a viable way of sorting out there financial problems. With some organisations charging interest as high as 4,000% it surely must be seen that these organisations are preying on people who need help.

Have a look at this video which looks at the standards and regulation of the payday loans.

There is a real risk of people falling into a rolling debt. They may borrow a small amount of money for an emergency and find them selves paying more in interest and unable to pay back the amount, this is when the trouble begins, the amount of interest will continue to put the individual in a very tight position. Perhaps leading to the individual taking out another payday loan and digging themselves deeper into a financial hole.

So what are the alternatives?

• Put the emergency amount on a credit card – much lower interest.
• Create an overdraft or increase the level of your overdraft – depends if the bank will allow you to do this.
• Borrow from friends or family – again depends on the amount and how kind they are feeling.

We at cashzilla believe that there needs to be regulation placed on these companies and help offered to those unfortunate people who have fallen into this financial trap. There are people who have taken out payday loans and have repaid them quickly and have had no problems but there must be something put in place to stop people from finding themselves stuck at the bottom of a financial mountain due to the huge amounts of interest put on an emergency loan.

Have you ever taken a payday loan? Did you have any problems paying them back? What do you think would be a better alternative? Any thoughts and comments please leave them in the section below.

Cards via plastic data card

Plastic Data Card was started in 1992 by Jim O’Carroll who was looking to capitalise on a growing demand and decided to start his own company to make the most of this demand.

The Kent based company supplies a wide range of cards from event passes to membership cards. The company supplies Tesco as well as other blue chip companies. Plastic Data Card has a number of satisfied customers, most  happy with the quick turnaround as Hannah Jones says:

“I was really impressed with the quick service that we received. You guys really stepped up to the plate to ensure our vip badges were delivered on time to a really important event.”

The company, like most small companies starting in this difficult climate, decided to look into using invoice factoring services to keep their business secure but struggled to find financial backing:

“Back then we were a young business. Some finance companies saw us as too much of a risk to offer a full range of credit facilities, so we chose factoring. This early decision has proved to be right – time and time again.

They use these services to get credit checks carried out on new customers submitting large orders. The service also has a bad debt protection element which allows for fast turnarounds and gives the company a competitive advantage.

Managing director Jim O’Carroll, said that the invoice finance service “has been a key part of the way we do business, and has certainly helped us to get where we are today.”

Today the company is keeping up-to-date with modern business and now has a Facebook and Twitter. The company is thriving in a difficult financial market by keeping to traditional business values like a good and reliable service.

Do you know of any businesses which are weathering the economic storm? Tell us about them in the comments section below.

Image by chris_jacobs_photography via flickr

A select number of corporate jets and commercial airlines will be awarded free carbon allowances, in light of the new expenses caused by the Europe Commission’s new carbon emissions trading scheme. The new arrangement will see airlines having to produce a permit for every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted by their aircraft. This has been met with mixed responses as it could be seen to raise the cost of flying for millions of passengers around the globe.

In order to prevent businesses from becoming immediately economically unviable, the scheme will be allocating a certain amount of credits, to ease organisations into the process.

Most notably, British Airways have been granted 10.34 million free carbon permits next year, which has been estimated as 6 percent of the granted to all EU airlines. This is the largest allocation by far, coming from an overall pot of only 56.7 million to be divvied up between 249 UK-based airlines.

According to the figures, the UK’s carriers will receive one third of the total permits being shared among the countries spearheading the EU emissions trading scheme.

In addition to commercial airlines, several corporations who operate private jets will be included in the emissions allocation. These include ExxonMobil, Starbucks, Coca Cola and McDonalds.

The European Commission has announced that the allowances for this new scheme will be staggered, with 900 airlines receiving help to meet targets in 2012 (0.6797 carbon allowances per 1,000 tonne kilometre flown), but this will drop to 0.6422 allowances from 2013 through to 2020.

The chief worry is that the additional costs of this levy will passed down to the customers, but this remains to be seen.

What do you think of the emission trading scheme? Do you think it is fair? Let us know in the comments.

Image Google

Ok so we all thought our money was safe in the bank . . .until they gave it away to people who couldn’t afford their loan repayments and crashed the whole financial system. So how about trusting our money with internet giant Google?

Well they aren’t exactly opening a bank (at least not yet anyway) but they have launched a contactless phone payment app called Google Wallet. This allows you to load up the app with your credit/debit details or a pre-paid Google card and then you can forget about having to touch money ever again. Certain phones which are enabled will have a chip in them which contains all your details and once it senses the reader at the checkout it does some fancy electronic thing and hey presto you have paid for your shopping.

Now don’t get too excited Google are focusing their marketing efforts in New York and San Francisco just now and helping shops set up the readers over there. But as usual the UK is set to follow in the USA’s footsteps so don’t splash out on a new wallet just yet. Google should hopefully announce a UK banking partner soon, in the same way that they teamed up with CitiCard in the US. This would be a great boost in reputation and revenue for whichever UK bank wins the deal.

So is replacing our wallets for phones a good thing? Well it certainly seems like a lot less hassle, and it could lead to better financial tracking and help people look after of their money better. However it could also create another opportunity for financial fraud. Some groups of people (like the ones without smartphones) will undoubtedly be wary of the new technology. But wireless technology, making it easier to spend, could encourage people to spend more often and help pick up the economy.

The video below gives us an insight into how Google wallet may help retailers.

So if you see people dancing about at the Tesco checkout waving their mobile at the checkout operator, do not be alarmed, they will simply be using their Google Wallet.

How do you feel about contactless mobile payments? Do you think they will enhance the economy or do you find it hard to see how they will catch on? Share your views.

Image via Images_of_Money

Since the banks lost all our money on the giant roulette wheel of the stock market, finance has come to the forefront of the news. Recession, debt, credit crunch and other depressing phrases have become common parlance. There’s also been a trend for massive numbers. Journalists are always keen to share figures but they just seem to be so dry.

When a building is built we get told its height in terms of stacked double decker buses. Has anyone ever stacked a double decker bus? When somewhere floods it’s a tragedy but we all want to know how many football fields the area represents. So here’s our stupidly metaphorical guide to the financial downturn.

Britain has a £900bn national debt. Wow, isn’t it big? That’s the financial equivalent of 600,000 Mini Coopers.  That doesn’t help?  If you were to park them all they would fill up 1071 football pitches. Now no one can play football so we might as well move them and pile them all on top of each other in a giant football pitch sized multi-story car park. Assuming we don’t leave any breathing space for the Minis that would reach 1.5km which is just under double the size of the  world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Is this all starting to make sense now? Good, lets go bigger.

Everyone keeps saying how important China is to the economy but what do we know? According to Google the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $4.99 trillion. That’s a lot of zeroes. How on Earth can we quantify a figure like that? Maybe it’s time to get away from Earth anyway. Everyone likes stacking pennies right? Well $1 worth of pennies are 15 centimetres tall. If we piled all 4.99trillion of them on top of each other, how far could that take us? A quick calculation shows that’s 748,500,000 km – hardly even a walk down the shops. Even at it’s furthest distance our tower would go way past Mars which can be up to 401 million km from Earth. Sadly it wouldn’t quite manage to reach Jupiter at 964 million km. Still GDP can always grow so one day we might get there. Who knows how many pennies there are?

Some have said that the US debt ceiling of $14.7 trillion is unimaginable. That sounds like a challenge! So let’s put all that cash in an imaginary giant money mountain – don’t roll down it or you’ll get paper cuts. The population of the earth is roughly 6.8 billion. If the US debt ceiling was shared between everyone then we would all have just over $2000. For that we could all buy 4 Apple iPad 2s. Wait a minute – the debt of one country could afford to buy everyone in the world four expensive Apple products.

We’re all screwed!

Can you quantify money in a meaningful way? Why not tell us how in the comments section below.

Now it seems there’s an insurance policy for everything. These days you can get insured against being kidnapped, against nuclear incidents or against earthquakes. And you can insure anything – art, any kind of pet, even body parts.

The following is a rundown of my favourite insurance types:

Body Parts Insurance

You may think this is only for celebrities, it’s not. If you rely on your body as a way to earn an income (perhaps models, performers, musicians, artists and minor athletes) then you might be interested in this unusual insurance type.

The policy essentially covers you if you are damaged as the result of an accident in your prized area, and unable to earn an income as a result.

Of course if you are a celebrity, you can still insure your body parts, as Mariah Carey was previously rumoured to have done, along with a lot of other celebrities.

Rabbit Insurance

Your insure your dog or even your cat, so why not your rabbit? This is the question rabbit-loving bloggers Bunnycover ask, with their list of UK rabbit insurance companies.

Although it’s still a relatively new idea, and there are only three companies that currently provide cover for rabbits, the idea is taking off. Especially now that Britain is getting more involved in rabbit show jumping, with hopes to beat off inventors Sweden in the future.

iPhone Insurance

Well, considering the cost of an iPhone, this one actually makes a lot of sense. What many don’t realise is that should you lose your iPhone, break it or damage it, you’re responsible for paying for the cost of a new one.

Unfortunately iPhones do get broken and lost quite a bit, at least according to gadget insurer Protect Your Bubble who revealed that iPhones get stolen, left on the roofs of cars, stolen from handbags and even dropped from hot air balloons or lost while sky diving.

There are currently a handful of insurance companies, most specialist gadget insurance companies, who insure iPhones and other smart phones, although the demand is definitely there for more.

These are but a handful of some of the niche insurance policies out there. And even though we’re in a recession, or a financially dark period at worst, there seems to be no shortage in the number of new and niche insurance policies popping up as the demand is uncovered.

As fuel and car insurance costs continue to rise, owning a car is becoming a costly business. But follow these 5 simple fuel saving steps and you could find that you can significantly cut the cost of motoring.

Keep your motor well maintained

Having your car regularly serviced may seem like an expense that you can do without but a well maintained engine will save you money in the long run. It is estimated that an under-serviced engine can reduce a car’s fuel economy by up to ten per cent.

As part of a regular service you should have your air filters and oil changed as this will help to maintain your car’s fuel economy. Having clean oil in your engine will reduce the friction caused by moving engine parts and this, in turn, will reduce wear and help to maintain efficient fuel consumption.

In addition, you should regularly give your car a quick look over and make sure of the following:

• Tyres are inflated to the correct pressure – under-inflated tyres add resistance and can increase fuel consumption to such an extent that it can add two per cent to your annual fuel bill!
• Your fuel cap fits correctly – if the cap is not airtight then fuel can easily evapourate.

Keep cool correctly

You may not realise it but keeping you air-conditioning on can increase petrol consumption by up to 25 per cent! So it’s best to keep cool by simply opening the air vents, sunroof or windows.

However, when driving at high speeds it may actually be more fuel efficient to keep your windows closed and cool down using the air-con system. This is because driving at speeds of over 60 mph with an open window dramatically increases drag and can affect petrol consumption more than using the air-conditioning.

Keep drag down

It’s not only open windows that can increase drag as anything that adds unnecessary weight to the car will also do this.

It is estimated that every 50kg of extra weight will increase fuel consumption by up to two per cent, so remove things such as roof racks, carriers and any unnecessary equipment that is being kept in the boot.

Keep the revs down

This could be the most difficult fuel saving tip to adhere to but it may be necessary to change your driving style to cut down on petrol consumption.

According to RAC studies, you can save as much as 30 per cent on fuel costs by simply driving smoothly and consistently, in high gears wherever possible, and by avoiding sharp braking and accelerating.

It’s also worth noting that driving at 85mph uses around 25 per cent more fuel than driving at 70mph so just sticking to the speed limit can save fuel.

Keep idling to a minimum

If you are going to be idling for more than five minutes it makes sense to turn your engine off altogether.

Keeping the engine running for more than a minute consumes more fuel than is needed to restart it. So by switching the engine off instead of leaving it idling you will save more petrol than is lost from the burst needed to fire it back up again.

How budgeting can strengthen your financial stability as well as marriage

Planning your wedding is the most important and exciting thing that can ever happen in your life. Read on to know how you can strengthen your financial stability before marriage and avoid any debt options in the future:

Don’t keep your finances secret

Since you’re getting married, you must not keep any secrets from each other including your finances. You as well as your spouse must know how much each of you earns and what are your savings. Since you’ll be sharing everything with each other, it’ll be better if you know each other’s financial background. You must also tell you spouse how much you owe, if you have any debts and also should inform him/her about any other money related issues.

Budgeting and fortifying your finances

Getting married to the person you love has many advantages such as you can discuss your financial problems with the person as well as make plans regarding budgeting your finances. This will further prevent you from going to any debt consolidation companies for help. You must create a budget and change it every week so that you can easily manage any sudden expenses. There are many budgeting software available on the Internet which can help you understand how to do it. You can also create docs and excel sheets for noting down your savings and expenses and work accordingly.

If you have debts, pay them off

When you get married, you’ll have more expenses than when you were single. Your spouse will also contribute to the expenses but if your money goes in paying off your debts, it’ll be quite long before you enjoy your married life. Take help of debt management plan and also other debt reduction options to get rid of debts quick. Inform about this to your partner also so that he/she may help you overcome debts.

Plan your marriage according to budget

You can have a themed wedding based on a healthy budget. You can have most of the hand-made objects in your marriage and for the caterers you can appoint someone you know so that you can save spending much on food. For the venue, you can have a simple canopied wedding in the country side with great view which will be inexpensive. Plan your wedding beforehand and both of you must contribute to it to save money for your honeymoon.

There are some lovely ways you can really save while planning and budgeting your marriage. These tips will surely keep you away from any kind of debts and you can lead a stress free life after your marriage.

Contributed By: Jason Holmes