Okay, so it would be a rare one of us who could save the full six grand – and not all of our ideas will work for everyone. But we all need more cash, and we all have something we could do to get hold of it.

Now, at Quids in! magazine we don’t want to suck all the joy out of your life, and we definitely don’t want to preach either, but if we could all follow just some of these suggestions think how much more in control of our lives we could all be! Maybe we could afford that dream holiday, or the perfect Christmas with the ones we love, or the car we badly need. There are some things about our money situation that we can’t change, but there are always some we can…

About 10 million adults smoke in the UK – about one in six of us. We know it’s no good, and it’s worse for our families. So let’s finally quit. It’s easily the most rewarding financial thing we can do… Even cutting down would save cash.

Roll over that loan a few times and it gets out of hand. We can save money by only ever taking out a payday loan if we know we can repay it first go. Even better, we should try to do without it.

A short shift at the local pub, walking someone’s dogs, a bit of babysitting… quite a bit of cash.

If we do a budget and avoid just one of those nasty charges
every month it soon adds up.

If you’re struggling to make ends meet get your finances in order by talking to a debt management charity. The best ones, such as Stepchange, are free. They may be able to stop you being charged interest and charges on your debt.

We know almost half of our readers are not online. And while there’s definitely a cost to getting online, surveys show that if you can manage it you’ll save money. On shopping, on utilities, on bank charges…

If we’ve got a credit card we’re likely to have an outstanding balance every month. If it’s £1,000 and we switch that to a credit union loan we could save a packet.

Yeah, telly’s great – but is the extra we get from Sky really worth it? When you add it up to what you could save in a year it becomes more attractive to ditch the dish.

Buy in bulk, compare prices, try own-brand, travel a bit further to a different shop – if we do all these things we can knock some money off our weekly grocery bill. Give it a go, why not?

Let’s get a benefit check up. Take a few minutes to use one of the many great benefits calculators on the web. It will make our head hurt, it may make us money. Worth doing. Try this one on our website.

All right, we might have to go twice to make £100, but you get the added benefit of clearing out your old tat. Or you could even make some stuff to sell there.