Moira Stuart and Adam Shaw

Is it possible to save the people of Newcastle one million pounds in just a day?

That was the challenge facing the Cashing In team.

Moira and Adam make a new friend

Moira, Adam and a small army of the country's leading independent financial advisors and tax and mortgage experts pitched up in the city centre to guide people through the money maze and tell them how to make the most of their hard earned cash.

Eight hours later the team had a surprise in store.

ADAM SAYS:

As a nation we waste a staggering �19 billion through poor financial housekeeping. We're mad with our money. We trust lenders who charge too much and invest with banks that pay too little. We lose our heads when it comes to investing.

Millions of people put their money in bank accounts with appallingly low interest rates. You can easily get 20 times more interest by just moving your money around. We have mortgages with lenders who aren't competitive and we don't make use of the tax breaks available to us. Cashing In is on a mission to change all that.

THREE SIMPLE STEPS TO SAVE MONEY:

Pat Bunton

We've borrowed �590,985 million in mortgages. According to research done for Cashing In by Pat Bunton from London & Country Mortgages, around 30% of us are on a variable rate with no redemption penalties.

The average rate we pay on our mortgage is 5.4%. In fact many of us are paying much more than this.

But working on this assumption, the average mortgage holder could reduce their monthly payments by 36% saving more than �1,000 a year - and many people could save a lot more than that.

Anna Bowes

A cash ISA is a gift, so it's hard to see why most people who pay tax and have some savings don't rush out now and get one.

If you've got extra cash in your cheque account you are likely to be earning around 0.2% interest a year. Returns like that have all the excitement of an old banger.

You can easily turbo charge your savings by getting as much as 20 times the amount offered by some of the main high street banks' current accounts. If everyone who doesn't have a cash ISA took one out we could save a huge amount of tax.

Anna Bowes from Chase de Vere says: "While individually this sum is small, by protecting �3,000 each from the taxman, investors could collectively save nearly �222 million."

John Whiting

If you want to save more - pay less tax. It's easier than you think. Thousands of us are thought to have the wrong tax code and as a result have more tax deducted from our salary than necessary.

John Whiting, tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says: "If you check your tax code and find that they haven't given you your age allowance, a quick call to the Inland Revenue can save you �320 a year. And there are millions more ways of saving tax by taking some time planning your finances."

• Filling in an R85 form would save 5.1 million people on low-incomes (non tax payers) an average of �62 per head
• Sticking to the 31 January self assessment deadline would prevent over 800,000 of us incurring a fine of �100
• �405 million is wasted each year by people not maximising personal tax allowances
• An extra �1,017 million could go to chosen heirs by planning properly to avoid inheritance tax
• �253 million in tax could be avoided by sheltering investments in ISAs
• Nine out of ten of us waste �95 a year in unnecessary tax - that's �4 billion