Saving money and losing weight are often viewed as the two of the toughest things we tackle. Both require discipline and hard work. But there are some simple tweaks we can make that will help us shrink our budget, save money and grow our savings account that don’t require a degree in business or drastic changes to our lives.

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5 Real Life Ways to Save Money

Try before you Buy:

Have you ever wanted to use a new computer program or buy a new video game and shelled out the big bucks, only to discover after using it for a week that you just hate it? Before you drop $50 on a new game, maybe you can play it at a friend’s house or rent it from Redbox? Before you buy the full version of a software program, see if you can do a 30 day trial. That will give you enough time to see if you will actually use it before you pay out the full purchase price.

Don’t buy a one-time book:

There are some books that you know are going to become classics and earn a place of honor in your personal library. But there are others, that are destined to be read once and then will only gather dust. Before you run out to the book store to buy a brand new copy, check your library and see if you can get it there. If they don’t have it, see if you can request it via the free interlibrary loan service.

Tip: Don’t forget that you can sell your used books to places like HalfPrice Books or McKay Used Book & CD’s in Tennessee and get money or trade credit!

Evaluate your movie services:

Do you really need to pay for Netflix, Cable and buy every movie when it is released on Bluray or DVD? There are definitely some movies that we like to keep in our personal library, but there are others that we will only watch one time. Look at how you view movies and see if there is a service you can cut out.

Keep the Change:

I have a bowl that sits on top of the refrigerator that is filled with random things that come out of my purse – extra packs of gum, box tops for school, coke caps with points that need to be entered into the computer and any spare change that I find in the house. It’s not convenient to get things out of that bowl, but it’s easy to just toss the coins into the bowl. I’m not planning to empty that bowl out until summer vacation. Then I will hopefully find enough money to treat us to something fun when the weather gets hot and we hit the road for a family trip.

How much money will a SunnyD bottle hold?

We were really curious to see how much money a bottle of SunnyD will hold. We started saving all our money last week and I bought all the coins from my kids piggy banks. Then we had a little friendly competition to guess the amounts. Each of the bottles is completely full of only one denomination coins.

Loose coins are often seen as a bother because they just fill the bottom of our pocket and purses; but when you collect enough, you end up with a nice stash of money.

Enter Giveaways:

Bloggers are always offering giveaways on their sites. The odds of winning giveaways hosted by blogs is far greater than entering huge sweepstakes. The entry options are easy and only take a couple minutes.

Looking for more giveaways to enter? Here is a Facebook group that shares low entry giveaways organized by ending date!

There are many ways to save money and many of them actually require real discipline, but these 5 ideas are so simple and painless that we should all be making these easy tweaks!

What are you favorite ways to save money in real life? I’d love to hear!

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Looking for other ideas for saving money on road trips?