The greatest money-saving tips since lovemoney.com began!

These five tips could easily save you £50,000...

lovemoney.com has been sending you money guidance since 11 December 2008. To celebrate its 15-month anniversary, here I'm going to summarise articles we've written that'll save you the most money. These are the greatest money-saving tips since lovemoney began!

1. And this one's just for starters...

I'm going to begin by telling you something you shouldn't buy to save yourself thousands. I'm talking about insurance that protects your mortgage, loan or credit card repayments. My colleague Cliff D'Arcy has for many years campaigned against the extraordinary cost of this product, revealing that such insurance can cost £3,000 on a loan of just £7,500!

You can, however, consider buying the same insurance separately through a stand-alone insurer, which you can find through the internet. These typically charge 1/10th of the price that your lender charges, and the terms and conditions tend to be better. Alternatively, consider my favourite insurance: income protection insurance. We wrote about this in Five ways to protect your income.

If you've been paying for payment protection insurance, there's a good chance you have a case to claim your premiums back. Read Rip-off insurance: Get your share of £200m compensation to find out more.

2. No salespeople required

Selling a £150,000 home could easily cost you £3,500 in estate-agent fees, even if you negotiate on price. That's a lot of money for very little work. Consider what they actually do:

• They value the property. This is a free service they do in return for a chance to sell their services to you.
• They might spend 120 minutes on emails and phone calls (assuming 10 minutes a week for 12 weeks).
• They might spend 400 minutes showing people around your home (assuming about 20 visits lasting an average 20 minutes each, and this includes the 10 minutes or so it takes them to drive to and from your property).
• Add 60 minutes for preparing all the advertising (including on Rightmove and such things as taking photos).
• Add on 30 minutes for the paperwork (which is generous as it's all standard letters and forms).

Add this up and, in total, they're earning about £344 per hour. They're not doctors. They're not lawyers near the top of their field. Even after deducting their minuscule expenses (for photos, brochures and advertising, for example), that's one heck of a wage.

Related how-to guide

Sell your home

If you want to obtain the best possible price when selling your home, then these ideas should help.

See the guide

An estate agent does just three key things, all of which lovemoney.com, in the past 15 months, has given you guidance on doing yourself:

• Establish the property price. Read point three in Sell your home in seven steps (although you may want to skip over point two).
• Advertise your property. Read how in Buy your next home on Google and Buy your home online and get a bargain, and Sell your home online (the latter of which includes some halfway houses between getting an agent and no agent, but at much lower cost.)
• Arrange viewings at the weekends (in groups if you want to save time), and write a list of things to tell prospective buyers (e.g. about friendly neighbours, transport links, a modern boiler, and other benefits that aren't obvious about the property). A list is cheaper and less forgetful than an estate agent. There's more on arranging viewings in Sell your home online.

• Watch our video: The estate agent debate

3. Cutting the cost of saving for retirement

Although this section is much shorter than the last, it's likely to save you six times as much money! Whether you're investing in a pension, or a shares ISA, or something else, you're probably investing in managed funds, which means that a human (or a team of them) is looking after your money.

We talk about the advantages of ditching managed funds and letting a computer run your investments in Two simple ways to invest better in shares. If you invest just £100 a month for 40 years you could easily save yourself £18,000 in fees and you can expect that the computer, simply by mimicking the stock market, will outperform almost all managed funds!

Read about some incredibly cheap funds run by computers in Three cheap index trackers.

4. Don't look to your mortgage lender for help

There are a couple of things that mortgage lenders offer that sound friendly, but really end up costing you thousands.

Some of them will encourage you to take a payment holiday. While this sounds nice, it means that you will end up paying more interest on your mortgage every month until you have paid the whole thing off! Read how a three-month payment holiday might cost you, on a £150,000 mortgage, almost £2,000 extra interest in The true cost of a mortgage payment holiday.

The same goes if you agree to let the lender add any arrangement or other fees to your mortgage, rather than paying for it yourself up front. The extra interest you'll pay on a £1,000 arrangement fee will almost double the cost of the fee by the end of the mortgage, as we explain in Why you should pay your mortgage fees up front.

5. This could be the big one

I've mentioned already that Cliff D'Arcy is the champion who tries to help people understand the extraordinary cost of buying protection insurance on your loans through your lender. In the same way, Jane Baker is as much a champion against the hideous cost of buying an annuity (a monthly pension income after you retire) from the same company you've been saving your pension with during your working years.

She calculates that by taking your pot of retirement money elsewhere and getting someone else to pay you your annuity income, you could save yourself almost £24,000 in 20 years. Read about it in Don't forget to shop around.

More: Five ways to make thousands from your home | Quit smoking and save £143,233