A favourite topic at the moment, but if you can make some savings now, there is no reason you cannot continue to do so once you are de-crunched. Just think what you could do with some extra money, and how you could use that to increase your overall wealth in the longer term!

Don't spend up to the max

So many people spend everything they earn, or in many cases, more than they earn. It is human nature that when we get more income due to a better job, a promotion, or a pay rise, we up our living standards. Regardless of credit crunches and recessions most of us need to spend less and save more, whether that's saving for the next car, or your retirement.

Allocate some time

We all put aside time for so many things in our busy week, whether that's a supermarket shopping trip on Friday evening, watching your favourite soap or comedy show on the television, or a round of golf on Sunday. But how many of us set aside some time each week for reviewing our finances? This could be a very profitable way to spend a small amount of time each week by just thinking of the items you could save money on.

Invest monthly

Once you have created some savings, the key then is to ensure that you use them wisely by investing for the long term, and not fritter them away in ancillary spending! This will help create real capital wealth for you for the future. Hence saving monthly into a stocks and shares ISA should be given strong consideration.

Saving monthly can help smooth stock market volatility, with fewer units bought when the unit trust price is high, but more units acquired when the price is low. This strategy can pay off in uncertain markets.

However, less well-known are the mechanics of pound-cost-averaging whereby the average price paid for the units via regular investment is arithmetically lower than the average market price over the period.

In the (theoretical) illustration below, £50 per month is invested. For the purposes of this example, charges are ignored and a lot of market volatility is packed into six months.

The average share price is 90p over the period. The actual average cost of the units bought on a monthly basis over the period is 85.9p, a saving of 4.5 per cent on the average market price.

However, it is important to note that if the market had risen over the holding period, it would be better to have been fully invested from day one, despite the inherent difficulties in the effective timing of lump-sum investments.

Review your investments

You can apply the same review logic to all your other finances. It can become daunting when it comes to your savings, pensions, investments, loans, mortgages, life assurance and the like. So call in the professionals to review your finances for you - just click here for more details.