Sort your finances this weekend

Jasmine Birtle's financial tips

On Friday's Working Lunch financial expert Jasmine Birtles came into the studio to share her top tips for battling through the recession - starting this weekend.

This was her advice:

Shop around for your bills
Get onto the internet and start switching to make money. Plan to cut your mobile bill and your landline phone bill in half. Take a look at TV/phone/broadband bundles too. If you use all of those services you could save a lot of money that way.

Switch your debts
If you have credit card debts right now, see if you could switch them to a 0% deal or a low lifetime balance transfer to cut down on the interest you're paying.

Start to self-insure
The best way to insure yourself is to set up your own 'savings safety net'. This is a savings account into which you put enough money to cover all your bills for at least three to six months.

So sit down and work out how much you have to spend out every month to keep the roof over your head and body and soul together, multiply that by three or six or even 12 if you want to be really secure, then put that money into this account (do it over time if you don't have that much cash to hand right now).

Once the money is in there, don't touch it! This is your emergency fund which you only dip into if everything goes wrong and you can't earn any money for a few months.

Consider income protection insurance
If you are worried about losing your job through sickness or accident then go online and find the best value income protection insurance.

Note, though, it may not cover you for redundancy. For that you can get accident, sickness and unemployment insurance but be warned - it tends to be very expensive, has a lot of get-out clauses and will only cover you for 12 months if you do manage to get it to pay out following redundancy.

Self-insurance (as explained above) is a much better way of protecting yourself from redundancy.

Have a clear-out
Have a good clear-out on Saturday and sell your junk on Sunday. Go round the house and put into boxes anything you don't want anymore. Then you can sell it at a car boot sale or online. This cash should either go towards paying off debts if you have them or adding to your savings safety net account.

Rent it
Make your home make money for you. If you have a spare room rent it out. If you can't bear to have someone 24/7 then consider renting to foreign students who only stay for 6 weeks at a time.

Also, if you have a driveway or a garage that you don't use, rent that out on parklet.co.uk or parkatmyhouse.com. You can even rent household goods and clothes if you want. Try rentnotbuy.co.uk or rentrino.com to rent out anything from a ballgown to a baby bath.

The views expressed are those of Jasmine Birtles, not the BBC.