This week Id like to go public with a game I have been forced to play with my mortgage company for the best part of a year. In our house it has become known as "mortgage chicken".

In January 2008, conscious that we were one of the 1.4 million UK households due to come off a low fixed-rate mortgage deal, (in August 2008) , I started looking around for a new deal, before we were forced on to our lenders SVR, which is 2% higher than Bank of England base rate.

By April it looked like I'd mis-calculated, as despite the a base rate cut of 0.25%, all the talk was of interest rates needing to rise to stamp out inflation. But still I could not shake the feeling that all was not rosy in the housing market, nor the wider economy, and that rates would have to fall not rise, despite what the papers reported.

Come mid-July and we got notification that our monthly repayment when we switched over to the SVR was going up by just short of £400 a month. A lot. And to say my husband was not happy with my managing of our mortgage renewal would be an understatement.

But still, the best fixed rate deals were considerable higher than our existing rate and what's more came with arrangement fees of £1,500-£2,000. These in my opinion were not just extortionate, but extortion.

To be even more blunt - banks who let's not forget for the most part were the architects of their own downfall - have been looking around for ways to boost earnings and decided once again to put the squeeze on consumers.

It is nothing short of a tax on the vulnerable.

How else can mortgage provides explain the rate at which such "fees" have shot up in recent years. If it really costs a bank 10 times more, to process a mortgage in 2008 than it did in 2004, then I think it is only fair to conclude that the industry is in a much bigger mess than it has currently owned up to.

So, faced with such extortion and by now receiving weekly emails from economists warning that the UK was not just facing recession, but depression, I reasoned that we should sit tight for a bit, take the hit of a larger monthly repayment in the short term for the possibility of smaller mortgage costs in the - hopefully - not to distant future.

Fast forward a few months and our mortgage payments are back to where they were in July, and should the Bank of England cut rates again on Thursday then we will actually see our mortgage repayments fall further. This is because our provider is one of the big banks currently either majority-owned by us taxpayers, or about to be so.

In terms of our game of chicken, we have been aided immensely by the intervention of the Government. Indeed it has been pleasing - to put it mildly - to see the Government get tough with mortgage providers over interest rates in recent weeks. After all, why should the banks be allowed to rebuild their balance sheets at the expense of consumers? While it has yet to act over arrangement fees, and can do little to force banks to offer lower new deals, its firm action over rates linked to base rates, is already helping ease the pressure on millions of mortgage holders, me included.

As a postscript to this, I should add that if rates are cut on Thursday we will be sticking with our December repayment figure, and using any excess over and above what our rate falls to, to make overpayments. Thus ensuring we do not miss an opportunity to shrink total mortgage debt, better equipped in case the game turns against us.

Chances are that if it hasn't started already then parents the length and breadth of the UK will be bracing themselves for some hard lobbying from their offspring about what the latter expect Santa to pop down the chimney with, this year.

More than ever, this Festive period, retailers will be upping their efforts to get us to spend in their stores, promoting "Christmas Giving" big time, thus further racketing up the pressure on parents.

Evidence is mounting however, that this year many people simply cannot afford a festive splurge - indeed one in four families are still paying off last Christmas. And with separate research revealing that money problems are a source of daily worry for an equal number of Brits, parents really will have to strike a balance between their childrens' expectations and financial reality.

For what it's worth my top tip for avoiding an overspend this Christmas is to cut the problem off at source - namely pester power. Children are like sponges when it comes to absorbing information - good when it comes to school work - not so great when it builds up their material expectations.

This will take some planning as it means keeping children away from the shops until after 25 December. But I honestly believe that it will lead to a less stressful and expensive time - and ultimately a happier family Christmas.

So make sure you do the weekly supermarket shop online or at a time when the children are not around. Remove all catalogues from areas where your children will find them. My son is five and he can not look through he pages of an Argos catalogue without uttering the phrase "I want that" over and over again. No catalogue, no "I want that".

Next up is steering clear of commercial television channels. I am one of five children and when we were younger ITV used to break regularly in the run up to Christmas. It was only years later that my mother admitted that in fact she and my Dad had actually been un-tuning ITV so that we did not come into contact with adverts, and so could not demand endless presents from them which they could not afford.

Admittedly in the age of digital television this will be harder to achieve, but not impossible. Ceebies and CBBC are, after all, advert free and it is also possible to record programmes to make sure adverts are skipped. Watching shows on BT Vision's replay likewise avoids ads while viewing favourite programmes online on a channel's website will also cut down on ad exposure.

Next up is to get your children to write a letter to Santa. This will help to identify what presents your children actually want, as opposed to them just regurgitating what they have seen in the most recent commercial break.

Also, do not forget that it is perfectly OK to expect your children to share big gifts. One Wii or PS3 per family is quite sufficient. In fact I think it is completely nuts to fill each child's bedroom with the same electronic kit - they can and should share!'

Finally I'd like to say that I have not grown up feeling deprived in anyway by my lack of exposure to TV ads or supermarket isles in the run up to Christmas. In fact my most enduring Christmas memory is the time Santa came to the front door (we did not have a chimney) to personally give me a present. And do you know what I got - a pack of felt-tips. I was over the moon.

PS. Once you have your children's lists do not forget to read Moneymagpie.com's excellent shopping guides, to ensure you get that at the best price possible.

This week I am on a mission not to spend a fortune over half-term.

I am in the mist of the October Week as I write. School holidays can cause a great deal of stress for parents, and quite a lot of it can be of the financial kind. Daycare or sports camps around here run to several hundred pounds a week.

Getting time off work can be tricky, and not everyone has grandparents nearby who can help out. But it has to be possible to get through a week's school holiday without breaking the bank. Well that is my aim, at least.

I have been working reduced hours this week and my husband has taken two days off, so between us we can just about juggle the week. If you have close friends nearby it might be worth trying to co-ordinate days off so that you have their children for a couple of days and they have yours.

But getting time off is only part of the cost-cutting battle. Not spending a fortune on entertainment is every bit as important.

A key part of my plan is to be so organised that we don't end up whimsical spending, from trips to the shops. First up is organising for friends to come over and play. This not only gives my son something to look forward to, it also makes entertaining him so much easier, and earns me some work time back when he goes on the return "play date".

Next up was setting a big goal for the week. This is get my son riding his bike, without stabilisers, by the end of the week. We have been spending several hours each day outside working on this aim and he is coming on really well for this focused effort.

Of course we could not be outside all week, the British weather has seen to that, but, this is were the inventive part of my plan comes in. Look around your house and see what activities you could do for free.

Thanks to the drive for "greenness" I have a recycle box of cardboard, toilet rolls and cartons in the house. This, some scotch tape, glue and paints provided a morning's worth of rocket building at no cost to me at all. Ditto the time we spent planting seeds in pots I have had sitting around the house for over a year.

We also did some baking. My son was given a biscuit making set and recipe book by his Godmother several years ago and we had never used it. Now we have and pictures of his efforts have been emailed to Australia, where his Godmother lives.

If you have read all this so far and are thinking, but maybe my child would prefer sports camp or dance club or art classes. Then consider this, there is a whole body of research (most recently from American Express, this month) which says that what children want most is time with their parents, not expensive trinkets.

And I'll warrant, that in the years to come, my son will think back on the week he spent with me learning to ride his bike and cherish the memory far more than he would any week he spent in expensive day care. Or at least I hope he will. I know already do.

My five-year-old announced at breakfast this morning that his school dinners were going to be free from now on. "Ur no" I corrected, "Only some children get free school meals and you are not one of them." Said I, as I filled in the lunch option form for next week and wrote a cheque to pay for it all.

Come the radio headlines at 8 o'clock though, turned out he was right.

The Scottish Government (we live in Edinburgh) has decided to provide free school meals for all children in primary 1,2 and 3. That is an instant saving of £7 a week or around £280 across the school year. What a great way to start the day.

The cash is welcome. Since he was born, his father and I (love him as we do) have been amazed at the cost of keeping him. We both work full time and at one point were paying out about £9,000 a year for nursery. Neither of our employers - national newspapers - at that time offered childcare vouchers. It took several articles (I was then the personal finance Editor of The Scotsman) on how much companies can save in Employers National Insurance contributions before my husband's company rolled out a salary sacrifice scheme which picked up part of the tab.

But I digress, basically we have kept ourselves sane over the last five years by glaring at friends who had parents near by to help out, and more healthily, focussing on August 2008 when he would start school and we - wrongly as it turned out - expected our childcare bills to evaporate (I actually pictured a kind of puff or smoke effect, when really strapped for cash at the end of the month).

Roll round summer 2008 and I was stunned by the cost of school uniforms. You can buy shirts, jumpers, coats and bags in the supermarkets for a couple of pounds a piece, but because his school prefers we opt for the ones from a specialist supplier all nicely logo-ed, the bill was considerably more.

I have also learnt a valuable lesson when it comes to school kit - shorts and long socks is the more cost effective option. The lesson was learned the hard way of course after two pairs of trousers had their knees torn in the first week. And before anyone suggest knee patches, I did not want to single him out so early in his school career and there is not one solitary child with patches in his playground.

Still having just been given back £280 before 9am by way of free school meals I must not grumble. Free food Woohoo!