purplerabbits

All that sounds good - you've got two options: increase income or decrease expenditure. The problem with the former is that when it happens, it's very easy to increase expenditure. Living on benefits can be easier than living on a reasonable wage, because you know you don't have the money to do various things and you get discounts on some of the rest.

Spending money on new DVDs etc is one potential saving: today's £29.99 boxed collectors edition set is tomorrow's two for £5 bargain bin fodder (and, if you're that way inclined, typically the day before's BitTorrent download...) If you must have something, copy it and sell it while it still has a second-hand value.

Not having a card is indeed a money-saving method. For the past couple of years, I've had no idea where my credit cards are - I know they're somewhere here, because no-one else is spending on them - and my credit card expenditure dropped to just the couple of autodebits on them.