My car is well over ten years old, so the Budget says I'll get £2,000 for it when I trade it in - but must it be for a brand new car, or just a car newer than the one I have? And what should I do with my money anyway? The bank pays rubbish interest, so am I better off with it under the bed? Oh help.

Fortunately, for well over 100 years, an army of experts, domestic goddesses, homespun economists and financial whizzes have been offering us guidance about saving or getting money. It's quite cheered me up, looking at all the advice from the past.

One of the simplest, most sensible books on money was written by Samuel Smiles in 1879. He called it Thrift. Great title. No messing around: 150,000 words of sensible, uplifting prose - as useful today as it ever was. In fact, I'm surprised no one has republished it for these hard times. He offers some good observations about practising thrift and he recommends four rules:

Spend less than you earn

Pay ready money and never run into debt

Never anticipate uncertain profits by spending them before they are secured

Keep a regular account of all that you earn

Later on he bemoans the desire of people to be seen to be rich, saying that it is worse now than it has ever been. He should have lived a bit longer. “There never was such a burning desire to be rich. People are no longer satisfied with the earnings of honest industry, but they must aim at suddenly becoming rich - by speculation, by gambling, swindling or cheating.” Or becoming a banker, as it's known today.

He particularly has a go at women for their extravagant ways. “There never was such a rage for dress and finery amongst English women as there is now.” He feels sorry for the shopkeepers who fall victim to their greed - agreeing to six months' or even a year's credit on the latest fashions, and ending up not getting paid when their husbands find out.

Many other writers and pundits, as well as Smiles, gave readers the benefit of their advice on how to be prudent and save money. And also how not to be conned. The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, which was edited by Mrs Beeton's husband, gave a warning in 1863 about innocent country girls falling for a series of alluring advertisements. For a sum of two guineas, they were promised lessons in lithography, which would enable young women to make loads of easy money. “A most unremunerative investment,” it sternly warned.

A magazine called Money Maker, which first appeared in November 1899, gave a list of hints for living wisely, which are mostly very similar to Smiles's - such as pay ready money, keep accounts, avoid waste. It also warns that cheap things are not always the best bargains, and can turn out uneconomical, a warning that still appears every week in one domestic magazine or other.

The magazine told you how to make money as well as save it, with alluring adverts for earning easy cash by sitting at home making sweets or clothes, which you sent off to a central point, or how you could become instantly rich by answering competitions and puzzles and winning big money prizes. It had one excellent tip for making money out of cigar ends that was apparently commonly practised in Paris: pick up discarded cigar butts, open them up, then sell the tobacco.

A rival magazine called Fortune, in its October 25, 1904, edition, describes some clever ways to keep your money and treasures safe at home without the use of banks - such as putting cash in the family Bible, under the mattress or in old shoes. Jewellery, it suggests, can be kept in a coal scuttle as burglars won't think of looking there, which sounds precarious to me.

That edition of Fortune promised 10,000 prizes for readers, the biggest of which was based roughly on lucky numbers, printed in each copy, that had to be collected over four issues. The prizes, for 1904, were pretty stupendous, starting with a new Humber two-cylinder motorcar. Second prize was a horse-drawn carriage - a Lady's Park Phaeton. Other prizes were a billiards table, a drawing-room suite, a typewriter - the must-have status symbols of 1904.

It was Tit-Bits, which first appeared in 1881, that led the way in offering enormous prizes to readers who entered their competitions. In November 1883, the first prize was a London house. The other innovation credited to Tit-Bits was an automatic insurance policy, which you were given purely by purchasing a copy of the magazine. It meant your next of kin got paid £100 if you were killed in a railway accident, and had on your person a copy of Tit-Bits (“No payment made in case of suicide”). By 1891 it was claiming it had paid out to 36 relatives. It's a sales gimmick that modern newspapers have not got round to copying.

I'd always thought the notion of buy-to-let was a modern concept, brought in by cheap mortgages in the 1990s and the notion that property prices would go up for ever and ever. So I was surprised to see a glossy advert in a copy of Good Housekeeping for April 1938 that was specifically aimed at those thinking of buying a holiday home to let on the South Coast. It featured a detached house at Saltdean at the “unbeatable!” price of £395. By letting it out for only two months a year, so it claimed, it would pay for itself.

The arrival of Premium Bonds brought in a new element to the Government's methods of getting us to save money with them - by introducing the chance of randomly winning money. They were introduced in 1957 by Harold Macmillan and £5 million worth were sold on the first day. The attraction was that your money was safe, but you also had the chance of winning a £1,000 prize, if Ernie - standing for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment - was kind to you. More than £100 million was taken in the first full year. Today about £10 billion goes into Premium Bonds each year, and there are now two prizes each month of £1 million. So they say. I have yet to hear of anyone admitting to being a million-pound winner.

The Premium Bonds are clearly a huge success, encouraging us all to save, plus the chance of a little flutter and big lottery win, but somehow I don't think good old Dr Smiles would have approved of them.

Hunter Davies is author of Cold Meat and How To Disguise It: 100 Years of Belt Tightening (Frances Lincoln, £9.99)

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