Save £2,011 in 2011!

Start the New Year richer by following these six easy steps - and save £2,011!

1.    Find a happier home loan

If you own a house with a mortgage, then your home loan is likely to be your biggest expense, despite after the steep rate cuts of the past year. Don't stay loyal to one lender; instead, shop around to see if you can reduce your interest rate by remortgaging.

The size of the saving: knocking 1% off the interest rate on a £100,000 interest-only mortgage would save you a tidy £1,000 a year.

Compare mortgages at lovemoney.com.

2.    Get quality quotes for insurance

It seems to me that there is an insurance policy to cover almost anything these days. However, a lot of these plans provide poor value for money, especially extended warranties, mobile insurance, boiler cover, card protection plans, identity theft protection, and so on. Get rid of this rubbish!

Nevertheless, some insurance policies are well worth having, but only if you get the right cover at the right price. Therefore, instead of automatically renewing your policies at renewal time, shop around for quality quotes for car insurance, home insurance, travel insurance and life insurance.

The size of the saving: by pruning your premiums, you could easily reduce your spending on protection policies by £300 a year.

Compare car insurance, home insurance, travel insurance and life insurance at lovemoney.com.

3.    Lower your energy bills

If you've not switched supplier in the past two years, then you're probably paying well over the odds for your gas and electricity. For the record, the average saving made by lovemoney.com readers using our clever energy price-comparison tool is a tidy £256 a year. That adds up to more than two grand over ten years.

The size of the saving: £256 a year.

Compare energy tariffs at lovemoney.com

4.    Cutback on communication costs

After shopping around for new energy tariffs, repeat this exercise for your broadband connection, your home telephone and your mobile. As I warned in Get better broadband for under £10 a month, it makes no sense to stick with an expensive, outdated 'legacy tariff', leaving new customers to grab the great deals.

The size of the saving: £200 a year across all communication costs.

Compare mobile and broadband packages

5.    Blast your banking and borrowing bills

The average credit card charges yearly interest at over 18% APR, which is more than 36 times the Bank of England's base rate of 0.5% a year. Why pay such rip-off rates when you can get up to 16 months of interest-free credit by shifting your debts to a 0% balance transfer card?

Likewise, why pay interest rates of 15% to 40% a year when you go overdrawn, when you can get an interest-free overdraft for a year, simply by switching current account?

The size of the saving: by reducing the interest rate on a debt of £2,000 by 10% a year, your yearly saving is £200.

Compare credit cards and current accounts

6.    Give your savings a shot in the arm

With the collapse in the base rate over the past year (it's tumbled from 5% to 0.5%), savings interest rates have been shot to pieces. Today, there are thousands of savings accounts paying less than 0.5% a year -- and that's before tax and inflation are taken off.

But it’s easy to earn a much higher rate on easy accounts if you’re prepared to jump through a few hoops. Read Earn 4% on instant access savings for more information.

If you don't think you've got any money to save, you may be pleasantly surprised to find you have, after watching this video: How to save when you've got no money.

The size of the saving: if you can make an extra £55 a year from your savings, then we've hit our target of £2,011 for 2011.

Compare savings accounts at lovemoney.com

Grand total

Let's check our grand total:

Good luck with bashing your bills next year. I hope you gain at least £2,011 in 2011!

More: Start saving in 2011 | Cut the cost of calling abroad | A cold wind blows on energy prices