News that the UK was finally out of recession did wonders for consumer confidence.

Just last week Nationwide, the UK's largest building society, reported its Consumer Confidence Index had risen for the second consecutive month, increasing by six points to 80 in February.

The index is now at its highest level since January 2008 and almost double the level recorded during the same period last year.

Tracking confidence can be tricky though and when it comes to the economy the UK is by no means out of the woods yet. And many economists are worried that we may even experience a double-dip recession.

The UK is in a real state of economic uncertainty. The budget deficit grows on a daily basis, inflation is creeping up and we are faced with the prospect of higher taxes while spending cuts lurk on the horizon.

Meanwhile the BBC also reported last week that at least 25,000 council jobs in England could be under threat in the next three to five years.

The broadcaster's survey of 49 councils with a combined workforce of 256,000 suggested cuts of around 10%. If applied to all councils this would result in 180,000 job losses.

The prospect of more job losses has not been lost on retailers.

Olympic Holidays is just one travel operator that is offering free holiday redundancy protection for customers booking a package holiday. With Olympic if you are made redundant you can cancel your holiday booking free of charge and be refunded for anything that you have paid.

Holidays aside, the prospect of losing your job is difficult to plan for at the best of times.
But every one of us is vulnerable to suddenly being made involuntarily redundant, even when the country isn't in economic turmoil.

Yet you can help prepare for the unexpected though.

There are three main types of protection products that can help you during difficult times: mortgage payment protection insurance; loan payment protection insurance and income payment protection insurance.

- get a quote that is tailored to your personal needs

The type of plan you choose will be based on your own circumstances.

If meeting your mortgage repayments in the event of involuntary redundancy is your main concern, then mortgage payment protection insurance (MPPI) could be best for you.

If you have loans or credit card commitments, then you may wish to consider taking out loan payment protection insurance. The income from the policy will help you maintain your monthly credit commitments, which can help stop debt from building up.

Alternatively, you may wish to choose how you spend the money yourself. If you want to have an income that you could use as you wanted, then you can take out insurance as an income payment protection insurance plan.

If you think that your job may be at risk then there are other steps that you can take too.

Start looking for new employment

Keep an eye out for another job, whether visiting a recruitment consultant or looking at the jobs section in the local newspaper. Jobcentre Plus has Britain's largest database of job vacancies. You can use the jobs and skills search to find a job that is suitable for you.

Stop spending money and start saving

Cut down on excessive spending. Do you need that gym membership? Do you need a digital TV subscription? Can you trade your car in for a cheaper to run model? Try and run down your debts as fast as possible.

Are you one of the UK's estimated 9.4 million smokers? If you are, then giving up the habit this Thursday on national No Smoking Day could make you significantly better off.

For not only would you save the daily cost of cigarettes but you'll also see other benefits such as a cut in the cost of life insurance payments.

We've taken a look at just five ways that ditching the habit could make improve your finances.

Ready cash

Quit smoking and a 20-a-day smoker will save £5.80 a day. It might not seem a huge sum but it soon adds up. In just a month you'll save yourself £176. In six months the total will be a year £1,056 and in a year £2,111. At its simplest level, you'll be significantly reducing the amount you spend: if you usually take out £20 at the cashpoint, this measure will save you eight trips there.

Boost your savings

Put the daily money aside in a savings account and you could soon have a tidy sum towards something you really want. So the £1,056 you'd save in six months could be a tidy holiday fund, while the £2,111 you'd save in a year could cover the cost of a second-hand car.

Increase your pension savings

An alternative is to divert the money straight into pensions savings, raising the amount that you save every time the price of a packet of cigarettes goes up. By saving £176 a month and increasing the amount saved by a conservative 2% each year, a 30-year-old might build up a pension fund of around £250,000 by retirement. Which is not bad at all.

Cut the cost of life insurance

After a year of not smoking, the cost of your life insurance could go down. Figures from Moneysupermarket.com show that former smokers can expect to see their policy payments reduced substantially. The company looked at quotes from five different providers (Aegon Scottish Equitable, Zurich, Legal & General, Friends Provident and Aviva) for critical illness and life cover of £150,000. It found that on average A 30-year-old man could save an average of £20.19 a month by being a non-smoker. Over the course of the 25-year term of the policy, he’d save £6,044. For a woman of the same age, the monthly saving would be the same, while the total saving would be £3,655.

- get a life insurance quote - it could work out as low as 99p a week if you're a non-smoker!

Cheaper health insurance

And just as life insurance costs drop significantly after a year of not smoking, the same goes for health insurance. Policies for non-smokers are significantly cheaper.

We could go on. For one, if you went on to suffer from a smoking-related disease there'd also be the potential costs of being unable or less able to work to be considered.

For more facts, motivation and support in giving up smoking visit the No Smoking Day website at http://www.nosmokingday.org.uk/index.htm.

Choosing where to buy your first home or where to move next can be a daunting task. For most people, finding the right home means finding somewhere safe, secure and affordable. After all, it's in these types of areas where demand should grow and in turn prices rise, enabling you to step up the property ladder when the time comes.

Yet who'd have thought that some of the most dangerous places to live and with the highest life insurance premiums in the UK could see property prices increase dramatically over the past 50 years?

Manchester's Coronation Street, London's Albert Square, Chester's Hollyoaks and Yorkshire's Emmerdale are perhaps the most dangerous places to live in the UK yet prices have rocketed since Corrie first hit our screens in 1960.

Barely a week goes by without tragedy hitting one of the four areas, from ghastly murders, child and adult abductions, street and sexual assaults, various robberies, arson attacks, assisted suicide and gangland warfare.

Staying alive

You need to be as sure-footed as John Travolta in order to keep your wits about you in soap opera land.

As the British Medical Journal pointed out as far back in 1997, staying alive in a soap opera is not easy. Even back then London was a more dangerous place to live with a character in Eastenders more than twice as likely to die during an episode than a character in Coronation Street.

The BMJ also found that people moving to Coronation Street between the ages of 30 and 44 went on to lead charmed lives, while their peers living in Albert Square "dropped like flies".

One common fact across all the soaps is characters tend to die young and from a variety of obscure and often violent causes, ranging from mystery viruses, plane and car crashes, mad psychopathic killers, sexual assault and characters coming back from the dead.

House prices

Soap opera land doesn't exactly sound the safest place to live yet latest research from FindaProperty.com reveals you'd be quids in on the property game should you ever take the plunge.

If you'd have lived in Eastenders' Albert Square for the past 25 years for instance your property value in the fictional East End borough of Walford would have rocketed 436%, taking the average house to £574,764, compared to £122,813 in 1985 when the soap began.

In real life the Square is based on Fasset Square in Dalston in London's E8 district. 

And analysis shows that house price inflation here has outperformed the most popular purchase on the Square – a pint in the Queen Vic. Some 25 years ago you could have got a pint for 93p yet today that cost has risen to £2.83 – a rise of 206%.

Overall properties on the Square are 515% more expensive than in rival soap Coronation Street.

But while EastEnders has the most expensive houses, it is Coronation Street that has seen the biggest house price appreciation in the time the TV soap has been running.

The Street has benefited from house price inflation of 7369%, with the average house in 1960 costing just £1,514 compared to today’s average of £111,581.

Ken Barlow, the only resident of the Street to have survived the last half century, will no doubt be rubbing his hands in glee.

Characters

According to FindaProperty.com's findings, former prostitute Pat Evans has the most expensive house on the Square, with number 31 valued at £847,821.

The tardis-like property currently houses seven people; Pat Evans, Ricky Butcher, Bianca Jackson and her children Whitney, Liam, Tiffany and Morgan. The house was left to Pat in the will of her former employer, gangster Andy Hunter.

"Addresses like Albert Square remain sought-after places to live for the sense of community enjoyed by the residents, in addition to easy access to local amenities and transport links," Nigel Lewis, property expert at FindaProperty.com told Money Hospital.

"The characters in Albert Square are certainly sitting on a profitable asset – and house prices set to increase further still with the knock-on effect of the 2012 Olympics."

Albert Square property facts

• Pat Evans is the person who has lived in the greatest number of residences throughout EastEnders history.
• Ian Beale is the only property millionaire on the Square and currently owns the most properties; his main family residence is 45 Albert Square. He also owns 55 Victoria Road (his former residence, he is now renting this out to unknown occupants), 15a Turpin Road (flat above Beale's Plaice chip shop, is being rented to his brother-in-law Christian Clarke) and 89 George Street (flat was being rented to Amira before her wedding to Syed, currently empty).
• 3 Albert Square is the most lived in address. This was owned by Tony Carpenter in 1985 and has since been split into three flats. The current residents of flat 3a are: Minty Peterson, Darren Miller, Manda and Adam Best.
• 43 Albert Square has had the second highest number of residents and was originally owned by Andy O'Brien abd Debbie Wilkins. This was also subsequently converted into flats.
• Flat 43a is currently rented in by Janine Butcher and Ryan Malloy. Flat 43b is rented by Shirley Carter and Heather Trott alongside her baby son George.
• 45 Albert Square is the only house that has always been owned by the same family, the Beales and Fowlers.
• 46 Albert Square is the Queen Vic and was originally lived in and run by Den and Angie Watts.

BMJ soap opera facts

• Staying alive in a television soap opera is not easy. There is more chance of dying than any other occupation in the UK.
• In a soap opera you are almost three times more likely than normal to die a violent death.
• It's more dangerous being in a soap than it is driving a Formula One racing car
• People suffering from many forms of cancer and other serious diseases have better five year survival rates than characters in a soap opera.

- get first-time-buyer advice

- use our mortgage repayment calculator

- life cover from £4.99 a month

Would you run out of money in less than two weeks if a wage earner in your household died or suffered a critical illness? Are you sure? Because according to insurance company Aviva, the average British household would.

Aviva asked just over 1,000 UK residents aged between 16 and 80 how much money they could raise in just such an emergency without taking on more debt. The answer was an average of £914. That amount of money would cover the typical household's weekly expenditure of £471 for just two weeks, the research found. Much worse off were the one in four respondents who said they would only be able to raise £100.

Put that against Aviva's figures showing that 63% of British households don't have any critical illness cover or life insurance and it's clear that many of us would be seriously underprepared if the worst were to happen.

The researchers went on to ask how people would raise alternative income to replace a missing wage. One in five (19%) said they'd sell their home, while 31% would sell their car. Many would give up holidays (51%) or use their savings (47%). Other personal possessions that respondents would choose to sell included TVs (14%), computers (13%), and even pets (6%).

Of those questioned, 59% said they'd see it as their personal responsibility to cover the income gap – but 17% thought the Government would step forward, and 9% thought an employer would do so. In fact it seems, individuals could expect at most £95.15 from the Government in the form of employment and support allowance.

It's a scary set of figures – because most of us will recognise the fact that if the worst did happen we'd struggle to survive financially. Now I can’t see that that in my house selling the family car - or even the family cat – would cut it when it came to making up for lost earnings. So for us here at Money Hospital we'd like to know: just what would you do if you lost an income from your household? And this isn't just something that's related to illness or death – losing a job could have a similar effect.

So I'm throwing it open to all of you to tell us: what would you do – or, indeed, what did you do? Has the worst happened to you – and what happened next? How did you survive? Did you have life insurance or critical illness insurance? Did you use your savings or did you sell possessions? Or did you find that by budgeting you could reduce the amount you spent in a way that made an important difference?

And if it hasn't happened to you, do you have a plan for what you'd do if it did? Share your experiences by posting your comments in the box below.

With premiums on a seemingly unstoppable rise, it's never been more important to know how to save money on car insurance.

However, price may not be the only factor. If it comes to a claim, you'll be far happier if you make sure your cover is adequate from the start. Not all insurers are equal!

Our latest guide from Mark Churchill will look at the basics, explain why price comparison sites are not always the best option, and cover some important money-saving pointers.

Click here to read our guide to car insurance »