Spring clean your finances

Gillian's spring cleaning advice.

There's just a few days left of the current tax year.

It's a good moment to reassess your finances and make sure you enter the next 12 months knowing you're doing everything you can to make your money work best for you.

Gillian Lacey Solymar has these top tips:

Mortgages

If you're lucky enough to have a tracker mortgage and you're saving money at the moment, think about putting that money aside to pay off more of your mortgage or put it towards a pension.

Most importantly make sure you pay the mortgage. Credit Card companies may shout the loudest for your money but if you don't keep up payments on your mortgage, you may lose your home. Always prioritise secured loans.

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Pensions

Pensions contributions: how much you should pay

Most people don't pay enough into their pension funds. As a rule of thumb, you should pay a percentage of your salary that's half the age you were when you first started contributing.

So if you were 30, you should be paying 15 percent of your current salary.

Take advantage of your company pension scheme if it has one - most companies will match your contribution, so if you pay in £100 a month, so will they. It's free money and it will stand you in good stead in later years.

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Savings

Shop around for a good savings deal using a website like Moneyfacts. There are accounts out there offering 3% interest so don't settle for 0% or 0.1%.

ISAs are generally a good option because they're tax free. They're also a favourite of banks and building societies because you're likely to keep your money in an ISA for longer.

If you're nervous about the stockmarket you can invest in an equity ISA - this will hold your shares money for you in cash until you decide to return to the stockmarket.

Remember you can put £3600 a year into an ISA - so you still have time to put aside that sum for this year.

Moneyfacts website

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Insurance

Make sure you have good life insurance, contents insurance and travel insurance policies - and that they're competitively priced.

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Check your bank statements

Each was a small saving and we thought we had already been very careful - but they added up much more than we expected. Tom Ball

Tom Ball runs a small communications company called Cognac. He told us that he saved a staggering £776 a month in just three hours by painstakingly going through all the direct debits the company had racked up in its five years of trading.

These ranged from deleting email and phone services they were no longer using to moving their servers to another online company that offered a better deal.

'Each was a small saving and we thought we had already been very careful - but they added up much more than we expected,' he says.

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Haggle!

Whether you're looking at property to rent or you've got your heart set on a pretty dress, now is a good time to haggle. Shops and landlords are more open than ever to negotiating prices so have a go - there's no harm in asking and you'll be surprised by the bargains you can get.