Written by The rather wonderful people over at playpennies.com have a competition running at the moment looking for tips on saving money and since this whole damn website is based around a year long expiriment to do just that I am throwing my somewhat tattered and hole riddled hat into the ring to win an iPad 2.
So if you are reading this via their link you may be unaware of the rather simple money saving concept of this site:- make some lists of all the media you have accumulated (and sometimes this is in large part due to being a denizen of hotukdeals or playpennies itself) but not actually used/read/played/watched. We are all guilty of it – getting that bluray as it is pretty cheap at the moment and save for a rainy day – banking a few cheap games in the steam sale or picking up that novel to read on holiday (that never makes it out of the suitcase because the kids need chaperoning to the pool again).
Now I freely admit that I am probably a bit of an extreme case and I have hoarded far too much media, however, the core concept probably still applies to many people out there – So go for it – get some media discipline and abstain from those spur of the moment purchases, turn off the one click purchasing and go dig out all the lost and unappreciated media. Hopefully you have more of a life than me and dont need to spend about a day collating it all and four blog posts just to get started!
Of course a little read of the blog will also show that no-one can sustain that kind of media discipline for too long – so below is a small collection of the ways in which I have managed to get new media without actually buying it:
Cokezone – I found that you can get free games from the EA store by cashing in cokezone points and even made a post about it on hotukdeals
Lovefilm Trial – I signed up for a 45 day free trial and got a 15 quid amazon voucher in return – new media attained and no money spent – as of course I shall cancel before the trial runs out (those a-holes made my mum redundant from their call centre so I have to ensure they never get any of my cash)
Bitching and whining – Pretty easy to do this one – go on and on about your media abstinence to your friends until they get you something out of sympathy/to shut you up – as shown last week that got me Portal 2 on release day 
Of course there are also things like bartering, swaps and even the old fashioned library – obvious but often overlooked.
Regardless this experiment has shown that a significant amount of cash can be saved just by using up old media so if anything take that away – also have I mentioned how hard it is and that there are soooooo many things I want that I cant get – steam gifts can be sent to Lombear and any amazon gift codes can be emailed to anything at this domain 
Lastly one last money saving tip is to enter competitions – just like I am now! (although don’t enter this one cuz y’know -
I’m trying to win an iPad 2 in the iSave, iWrite, iPad competition from PlayPennies.com!)
