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The UK's one and only professional money saving expert, Martin Lewis, presents this Free To Use, Ad Free, Independent, Unbiased and Journalistic website, which provides a wealth of information for consumers on how get the best value for money.

This website features a wide range of useful articles on both reducing regular expenses (utilities, shopping, insurance etc) and locating the best investment vehicles for savings. I have used a lot of the information and techniques myself and saved a fair bit of money so I can vouch for their effectiveness. Additionally, the website is not profit-driven and is ad-free so the advice given and products recommended are done so with complete impartiality, which adds an extra dimension of credibility.

The chat forum is also very useful for consumers to get advice and information and share their experiences with each other.

I would recommend that everybody with an interest in money saving sign up for the free newsletter and visit the website on a frequent basis to stay up to date with all the tips and tricks of consumerism.

Recently, I've been looking into the advantages of changing my Credit Card. At the moment, I use a bog-standard Lloyds TSB Credit Card. It was the first and only Credit Card I've applied for and I've had it for about 10 years.

To be honest, I hardly ever use it and when I do it is only for small amounts. I've only been charged interest on a few occasions when I forgot to pay the bill. I remember once I was charged something called Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). I must have agreed to it when I applied for the card. Basically it meant that if I was unable to pay the bill, the credit card company would pay the bill for me. For my circumstances it was completely unnecessary as it was costing about a quid per £100 of credit used. I duly cancelled it but felt a bit duped that they'd charged me for it when I wasn't even aware of what it was.

Anyway, I've been investigating the pros and cons of various credit cards and one particular credit card has got me very interested indeed. It is the Morgan Stanley Casback Credit Card. It works by giving me back a small percentage of the transaction fee it charges retailers. For every purchase I make, I get 0.5% (or 1% until I've spent £2'000on it) of the value of the transaction. So, for example, I get back 50p for every £100 I spend on it. The cashback is totted up at the end of 12 months and a cheque is sent to me.

I have decided to apply for this credit card. With Christmas fast approaching, I could put all my xmas shopping on the card and make myself a little cash at the same time. Morgan Stanley are also offering an introductory bonus of 2% cashback for the first 3 months, so the more I buy during this period, the more cashback I get.

Obviously, I need to make sure that I don't start spending willy-nilly on the card just to increase my cashback but I can think of a number of cash purchases that I currently make that I could transfer to the credit card. These include grocery shopping, petrol, gifts, books etc.

Another credit card I liked the look of was the Amazon Credit Card. It works in a similar way but the cashback can only be used to buy products from Amazon. This would have been enough to put me off applying for it, but I found out that Amazon will give me a £15 voucher for their store after I make my first purchase using the card. Therefore, I have decided to apply for it, use it once, redeem my £15 voucher, then cancel it. I'll update the results of my experiences with my two new credit cards.

Finding the best gas and electricity provider is one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. It is very time-consuming to work out who is the cheapest due to the complicated nature of the tariffs. I can only assume the utility companies do this to hide the actual value of the services they provide.

Most providers charge a certain amount for the first x per KWH (Kilowatt hour) of power used (PRICE X), then revert to a different costing method for anything over this amount (PRICE Y). Some of them split their charges between PRICE X and PRICE Y over a 3 month period while others split the charges over a yearly period. Some charge more per KWH but offer some cashback after 12 months, others are cheaper but no cashback. And this doesn't include Economy 7 (electricty used at night) calculations plus the fact that energy prices keep rising and companies don't increase there prices at the same time creating an unequal field for comparison. Confused? I am!

All in all its a complete mockery of consumers and a travesty that the government allows these companies to get away with confusing pricing.

The only way to work it out properly is to sit down for 5 hours and go over your bills for the last 12 months working out exactly what (WATT!) power you've used and at what times (day or night) before calculating how much every other company would have charged you for that period. Which is exactly what I did!

I won't bore you with the details. It'll only confuse me more, But so that I didn't have to check every company, I used the USWITCH website to narrow down my list of potential providers. Fill in your details on the USwitch website and they estimate the cheapest provider for your circumstances.

I took the top 5 from the list plus 3 or 4 others and calculated the costs myself based on last years figures. It actually turned out that the third company on the list was the cheapest for me, so the USWITCH results were not 100% accurate but were very close.

For my individual circumstances NPower were my best bet taking advantage of their Sign-Online product.

I'm currently with Powergen and they have been hiking up their prices for the last 18 months or so and it's getting beyond a joke. I'm paying nearly double what I've paid in previous years. NPower worked out about £90 per annum cheaper.