Babysitting circles

If you have young children don't fork out a fortune for baby sitters, join a baby-sitting circle. Ask around in the playground and the chances are there will be one or two  at your children's school or nursery already. Ask to join. Typically the way it works is that you save tokens when you babysit for other people's children and you use them when you want to go out kid-free yourselves. If you can't find a baby sitting circle why not get together with some friends and set one up. All you need to do is print some tokens.

Men's haircuts and shaving

Whatever you do, don't buy big brand shaving products: razor blades from the big brands are even more criminally expensive than mobile phone calls. Get yourself a three-blade razor (three blades should be enough for anyone) for about three pounds with five replacement blades from Lidl. The replacement blades you buy after that are a tiny, tiny fraction of the price of big-brand blades (£3.22 for twelve the last time I bought some). Instead of buying tins of shaving foam, which last a matter of weeks if you're lucky, get a shaving brush and bowl with shaving soap. Replacement shaving soaps cost about £3 from John Lewis and last about six months.

This tip is a bit hard on barbers, so make up your own mind: you can save yourself over a hundred pounds a year by buying some clippers and giving yourself a number three cut once a month. It's very easy and doesn't really look any different to a crew cut from the barber. (You'll probably need a wife/partner/friend to do the back though).

Always get three quotes

This one's fairly obvious, but I'll put it down anyway as it has probably saved us more money over the years than anything else. For years it was standard practice in purchasing departments.

If you are going to fork out a lot of money for something (for example to get your boiler repaired), make sure you get (at least) three quotes.

The diagnosis on our boiler recently went from "you may as well get a new boiler" (almost £2,000 fitted) to the £120 we actually paid (labour and parts) to get a diaphragm changed in a divertor valve. Amazingly, in the process we even found a good local plumber.

It might even apply to dentists. Many years ago, after not going to the dentist for quite a while, I got told by a new dentist that I needed seven major fillings and some other work. My wife eventually persuaded me to go and see a different dentist who asked me, literally, whether the first dentist had had a white stick, as I didn't need anything doing. When I went back to the first practice to complain, I was told the dentist had been suspended for suspected malpractice.

John Lewis, incidentally, do live up to their promise of never knowingly being undersold on the high street. If, by accident, you do buy something in John Lewis that you could have got cheaper elsewhere (it needs to be identical) all you need to do is take some written proof along or give them a phone number they can ring to check, and they will refund you the difference. Unfortunately it doesn't apply to things you can buy on the internet, so has reasonably limited relevance now that so many things are a lot cheaper on the web.

Energy

These two websites will provide you with pretty much all the information you could ever need on energy saving and saving money on energy:

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/

http://www.uswitch.com/

Dishwasher tablets

Dishwasher tablets are another item which falls in the criminally expensive when bought from big brands category. Lidl W5 dishwasher tablets currently cost £1.73 for a box of thirty and are just as good. (Actually the same advice goes for washing powder, fabric conditioner and bleach - you have to be mad and/or brainwashed to buy the big brands.)

Do a blind taste test

A couple of years ago we were having a heated discussion about whether to carry on buying a certain very well-known brand of tomato ketchup. To resolve the debate we hit on the idea of doing a blind taste test (two dollops of ketchup on a plate without the person tasting knowing which was which.) All of us who did the test chose the Lidl own-brand ketchup over the well-known one: it tasted more tomatoey and less sugary. So ever since then we've being buying the own brand ketchup at a third of the price of the big brand. 

I don't know what we'd have done if the test had gone the other way, although we do still buy a well-known brand of pickle (from Lidl).

Christmas Puds

And whilst on the subject of taste tests, have a look at Which Magazine's Christmas pud taste test. You might be surprised at the results:

http://www.which.co.uk/reviews-ns/christmas-puddings/christmas-puddings-compared/index.jsp

If you do a bit of investigative work yourself, you'll find that the results hold true for a lot of other products as well. For example, olive oil:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/5871181/Lidl-and-Aldi-olive-oil-beats-MandS-expert-testers-find.html

Herbs

Lidl occasionally do large potted herbs that you can repot and grow for ages and ages (£1.29 for Thyme, Rosemary, Sage...). The smaller pots (69 p basil, parsley...) tend to wilt just as quickly as other supermarkets' herbs.

Packed lunches

Let's say you pay £3 a day for shop-bought sandwiches at work. That's fifteen pounds a week, sixty pounds a month, that's almost £700 per year just for one person (allowing for holidays), and £26,400 over a working life if you don't take inflation into account... Taking ten minutes to butter a couple of slices of bread and put something in them in the morning is not a hardship once you get used to it and saves a fortune.

On days out, a packed lunch with twiddly bits and a rug attached is known as a picnic and always generates enthusiasm from small children, which is very lucky as picnics are a key tactic in the never-ending battle to hide the existence of happy meals.

Spaghetti on Sunday makes chilli on Monday

A 400g pack of mince can go a very long way. If you make a delicious Bolognese sauce for spaghetti on Sunday evening all you need to do on Monday is add a bit of chilli powder and some kidney beans and there's your dinner. Bolognese sauce also comes in very handy for next day cottage pie or lasagne.

Don't buy "non-stick" pans

The non-stick coating wears out in next to no time and you're left with something that is the opposite of non-stick and flakes of dodgy stuff in your food, or you have to buy a new pan. Get a heavy-bottomed stainless steel frying pan instead. We bought ours fourteen years ago from John Lewis and it's still as good as new. I can't find the equivalent on the John Lewis website (they now only seem to do a "non-stick" one in their classic range) so you'd be best off having a look in TK Maxx (e.g. Lacucina large copper-bottomed, stainless steel frying pan: £7.80).

If you wear glasses (or contact lenses)...

If you wear glasses, by all means get your eyes tested on the high street, but whatever you do, don't buy your glasses there. Once you have a prescription you can buy your glasses online from Iris optical and save yourself £100+ on frames and lenses.

http://www.irisoptical.co.uk/

I've used Iris twice now and each time the service was excellent.

Watches that don't need replacement batteries

Traditional automatic watches are very pricey and require regular expensive services. Citizen (eco-drive), Seiko and Pulsar (kinetic) all do watches with tiny electric generators which automatically power a (very accurate) quartz movement and mean that replacement batteries are never required. The watches themselves can be expensive but there has been a reader's offer running in the papers for a couple of years now for a Pulsar kinetic watch at half the recommended retail price:

http://www.guardianoffers.co.uk/mall/productpage.cfm/GuardianOffers/_4002.1.1/-/Pulsar-kinetic-watch

Aldi face cream

Aldi face cream has become a bit of a cult. At £1.89 it's as good as facecreams costing more than ten times the price. See these two articles:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1577627/%27Miracle%27-face-cream-costs-less-than-andpound2.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-512340/Forget-Botox-try-award-winning-1-89-anti-ageing-cream-thats-flying-supermarket-shelves.html

Lidl have brought out an equivalent (as well as a range of quality cosmetics).

Sugar soap

Sugar soap will clean just about anything, including hard kitchen grease. You use it in heavily diluted form so it lasts for ages.

Free, legal music downloads

Depending on your taste in music, have a look at -

Tasmin Little:

http://www.tasminlittle.org.uk/free_cd/index.html

or Nine Inch Nails: http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup

Bandcamp is a site designed to help musicians promote their music on the web and offers free downloads:

http://bandcamp.mu/

Have a look also at: 

http://www.last100.com/2007/08/17/10-sites-for-free-legal-music/

Squeezed Books

If you need to keep up with the latest business "best-sellers" for work but don't fancy forking out for them, you could do a lot worse than have a look at:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/

The site provides free summaries of some very well known business books. You could save yourself a lot of money, not to mention time that you could spend on reading some more interesting books instead.

Don't use 0870 phone numbers

This is a really nifty site that lets you search for standard rate alternatives to 0870 numbers:

http://www.saynoto0870.com/search.php

The site works for all 08** type numbers (including 0871, 0845, 0800, 0808 etc.) 

08** numbers are really expensive, because not only is the phone company ripping you off, but the company you are calling is also making money on you ringing them.

For other tips on how to save money on phone calls have a look at our phone & TV page.

Use the Oxford English Dictionary for free

You can use the Oxford English dictionary for free online, here:

http://www.askoxford.com/?view=uk

To look up a word in the OED just enter it in the search box.

Children's Parties

Hiring a venue and entertainer for children's parties can cost an absolute fortune. With a bit of baking and other preparation having a birthday party at home, or in a park in the summer, can be even more fun than getting someone else to organise it.

Party Game Central has hundreds of free game ideas:

http://www.partygamecentral.com/

as does:

http://partygameideas.com/

You can find all the baking recipes you would ever need on this website:

http://thefoody.com/baking/index.html

If you need some help with planning the party, then iVillage has an excellent guide:

http://www.ivillage.co.uk/parenting/occasions/birthdays/articles/0,,637040_638152,00.html

De-pill woollen garments

You can extend the life of sweaters by shaving off the fuzz with a D-Fuzz-It comb. You can buy one online in the UK here:

http://www.whiteofhawick.co.uk/products/D%252dFuzz-It.html

Here's the manufacturer's website:

http://www.d-fuzz-it.com/

Don't ring directory enquiries

Use BT's free web service instead:

http://www.thephonebook.bt.com/publisha.content/en/search/residential/search.publisha