swagbucks

7 Apps That Actually Pay You to Shop

Kyle James — Fri, 27 May 2016 10:30:04 +0000

We all know "there's an app for that." Usually we're referring to apps that make our lives a little bit easier somehow. But what if there were a bunch of apps out there that'll actually pay you to shop? Whether it be through earning cash back by purchasing stuff we'd be buying anyways, or simply paying you to snap a pic of your receipt, these apps all have the potential to help you earn some significant money. What's more helpful than that?

1. Swagbucks

Swagbucks is a cash back app with a twist — namely it focuses on surveys as its primary business model. You download the app, pick a survey to complete, and earn "Swagbucks" when you complete it. The cool thing about the surveys is they tell you exactly how long they will take to complete, and the number of Swagbucks you'll earn. For example, a six-minute survey will give you 50 Swagbucks and the questions are very simple, opinion-based questions. Earn 500 Swagbucks and you'll be eligible for a $5 gift card from Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart or Target. Sitting in the doctor's office waiting room, or maybe at the DMV, complete a Swagbucks survey or two, and before you know it, you'll be treating yourself to a free Venti Frappuccino.

2. iBotta

While already on the radar screen of most frugal shoppers, iBotta is a terrific way to earn cash at the grocery store. Cash back takes the form of "rebates," and you simply unlock rebates on specific items before you head to the grocery store. Items that often have rebates available include such staples as milk, eggs, yogurt, and butter. Then when you return home, just scan the receipt with the iBotta app and your rebates, once verified, go straight to your account balance. When your iBotta account reaches $10, you can request payment via PayPal or Venmo. The app is terrific way to supplement traditional paper coupons and double your savings in many cases.

3. ShopKick

The ShopKick app rewards you with free gift cards for doing the shopping you'd be doing anyways. It works by giving you reward points, known as "kicks," just for walking into stores like Walmart, Target, Starbucks, Best Buy, and even at your local grocery store. Then when you buy something from the store, you earn even more kicks. Earn enough kicks, and you'll get rewarded with free gift cards to the store of your choosing. Surprisingly, it doesn't take much to earn things like a $5 Starbucks gift card. You'll also be kept updated with new coupons and deals at your favorite stores so you can save even more. An insider tip to quickly add up kicks is to follow ShopKick on Facebook as they update their feed with new ways to earn free kicks.

4. Mobee

Mobee touts themselves as a "fun, new way to make money on your phone." Once downloaded to your smartphone, the app works by displaying "missions" in your local area that pay you money to complete. The missions are displayed on a map allowing you to quickly see which ones you can easily perform on your next shopping trip. The idea is that you're going to be there anyways, so why not earn a couple bucks in the process?

For example, your local Starbucks might have a mission that requires you to answer a few questions about your visit. Most missions give you 250–750 points and a $5 Starbucks gift card is available after about 500 points. Earn 2,500 points at Walmart and trade your points in for a $25 gift card. I was happily surprised to see the points required to earn gift cards were very reasonable, making this app worth a look.

5. Receipt Hog

Receipt Hog allows you to cash-in on your shopping receipts. Unlike cash back apps like iBotta, Receipt Hog lets you earn rewards by scanning your receipt from ANY store and it doesn't matter what items you purchased. Once you earn 1,000 points, you'll be eligible for a $5 Amazon gift card or $5 sent directly to your PayPal account. You'll earn 50–100 points per receipt making a free $5 pretty easy to obtain. I've been using this app for a few months and have already earned $25 in Amazon gift cards with very little effort.

6. Gigwalk

When you're out-and-about, on a shopping trip, or simply taking a stroll through town, use the Gigwalk app to earn some extra cash by completing small tasks. A couple "gig" examples include $10 for taking a dog on a walk or $4 for taking a picture of a store display. The closer you live to a large metropolitan area, the more gigs will be available to you. While the app is appealing as a cool way to earn a few extra bucks, the negative reviews of the app revolve around not enough gigs available and a waiting period for approval that often exceeds a week. But it definitely has potential and is worth being on your radar screen.

7. Field Agent

Somewhat similar to Gigwalk, Field Agent pays you to do small jobs in your local area. The biggest difference between the two apps is that Field Agent is more shopping-focused and has "jobs" at locations like Costco, RiteAid, Safeway, and Marshalls. Jobs are first come first serve, pay between $2 and $15, and must be accomplished within two hours of accepting. An example of a past Costco job was an "egg audit," which for $7, required you record the egg sizes, egg prices, and count the number of egg products in the warehouse. An easy $7 in your pocket if you're on your way to Costco anyways. Similar to Gigwalk, the closer you live to a metropolitan area, the more jobs will be available to you via the app.

Free for iOS and Android.

How do you use your smartphone to earn a little extra money?

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This article is from Kyle James of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Effortless Ways to Make Money Online That Don't Require Skills

Rebecca Leib — Mon, 18 May 2015 02:27:02 +0000

Online job opportunities are increasingly available, as well as online marketplaces for those with crafty skills to sell unique wares. But what if you're not looking for something that requires a serious time commitment? If you want to make a few bucks for spending a few minutes of downtime while waiting through commercials or during a boring conference call, here's a great list for you. Even better, some places will give you cash back for shopping at places you already shop at anyway. You'd just be leaving money on the table if you don't sign up!

InboxDollars

InboxDollars is another program that lets you make money doing a variety of things online.

Complete free offers and earn up to $20 by trying out or signing up for various products and services. For example, earn credits for searching with Bing! or sign up for different rewards programs. Earn $5 just for signing up!
Take surveys. Even if you are disqualified from a survey, you get a spin on Billy's Spin and Win which lets you earn survey tokens and sweepstakes entries.
Play your favorite games at no cost or get 10% back when you purchase token packs and boosters.
Use the InboxDollars search engine and earn cash.
Watch videos or complete required activities.
Shop online through their partners and earn cash back on everyday purchases.

Sign up for InboxDollars today and get $5!

Swagbucks

There are many ways to earn with Swagbucks.

Shop popular retailers through their portal and earn points called SB. For example, you can get 4 SB per dollar at Amazon or 8 SB at Travelocity. Even better, they often have special discounts, like 15% off any order at JCPenny plus get 4 SB per Dollar. Earn $5 just for signing up!
Take surveys to earn SB. You can earn 60 SB every day just by completing the daily surveys. Highly targeted Gold Surveys allow you to earn even more SB.
Search using the Swagbucks search engine. Just use their search engine to do your usual internet searches and earn SB!
Watch videos and earn up to 150 SB per day. Choose from a variety of videos including fashion, entertainment, cooking, news, and more.
Play games and earn SB for any money you spend on your favorite games anyway.
Swagbucks VISA Rewards Credit Card: Get 1,000 SB just for making a purchase within the first 3 billing cycles. Earn an additional 2,500 SB if you spend $1,000 within the first 6 billing cycles. Earn 1.25 SB per Dollar on every purchase.

Sign up for Swagbucks today to get a $5 signup bonus.

Bing Rewards

Earn points for searching the internet through Bing Rewards. That's it. Easy. You can earn $100-$200 a year in rewards just by using Bing's search egine to do searches you do every day anyway. Use Bing on your desktop, tablet, or mobile devices (you even earn credits just by downloading the app). Credits can be redeemed for airline miles, meal discounts, or gift cards from popular retailers like Starbucks and Amazon.

Sign up for Bing Rewards today!

Upromise

If you like shopping and have kids who are college bound, Sallie Mae's Upromise service is a great way to save for your child's academic future. Upromise creates a college savings service that harnesses the purchasing power of parents, extended family, family, and students to earn rewards. These rewards go into an account that helps combat student loan debt. A brilliant idea, especially knowing how expensive college can be.

Earn 5%-10% cash back with over 850 online shopping partners, including Sears, Groupon, Staples, and Macy's.
Earn 2-8% cash back at over 10,000 participating restaurants.
Earn 5% cash back when booking travel with their travel partners.
Earn cash back by redeeming Upromise ecoupons.
Earn cash back by signing up for offers from local businesses and services.
Get a boost in cash back rewards by signing up for the Upromise MasterCard (extra 5% on online shopping, restaurants, and online travel, 2% on department stores and movie theaters, and 1% on all other purchases).

Sign up for Upromise today!

Cash Back Shopping

These sites offer cash back for shopping at their partners.

Ebates: Features a "Daily Double" store that offers double cash back. For example, you can get 16% cash back for a Daily Double store, plus any available discounts or coupons they have available. Earn cash back even easier with the Ebates Cash Back Button, which will alert you if you're browsing a participating site. Sign up for Ebates today!
TopCashBack: Passes 100% of the commission it makes to members, earning them the title of "most generous cash back site." Sign up for TopCashBack today!
FatWallet: Current deals include up to 4% back for shopping at ebay, 6% at Groupon, or up to 27.5% at Angie's List! Sign up for FatWallet today!
Rebate Codes: Rebate Codes offers cash back at over 900 stores (for example, 3% at Amazon and 3.5% at Overstock) as well as over 50,000 coupons. Sign up today and get $5 for joining!
Dollar Dig: A newcomer in the cashback world, Dollar Dig offers cash rebates at over 2,600 stores. You can earn up to 60% cashback, as well as straight dollar amounts for signing up for offers. Sign up for Dollar Dig today!
Ibotta: Earn cash back for everyday purchases like groceries, household items, and more. Sign up for Ibotta today!

Cash Back Credit Cards

If you aren't getting rewards for your credit card spending, it's time to join and start cashing in. There are some really great cash back credit cards available right now.

Micro Sites

A few other places to earn some quick money doing small tasks include:

Survey Money Machines: Large companies need lots of feedback on their vast array of products in order to continuously improve their offerings to consumers. You can be a part of the dialogue and make some good money on the side. Sites like Survey Money Machines will pay you to take a multitude of surveys. They don't pay much individually, but do a bunch, and it can really add up. (See also: How to Get Paid to Take Online Surveys)
Amazon Mechanical Turk: Pick a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) and start earning money. Select from over 200,000 tasks and work whenever it's convenient for you. These tasks could be data entry, answering a few short questions, or looking up an answer. (See also: 4 Best Micro-Job Sites)
TaskRabbit: People post requests for small tasks and quick errands. If you have some time to kill, you might as well make some money and help someone else out at the same time. (See also: 20+ Ways to Make Money Today)

Do you earn extra income online? How?

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This article is from Rebecca Leib of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Christmas Shopping With Fake Money: Time to Get Started

Carrie Kirby — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:00:07 +0000

Last year, I wrote about Christmas shopping for my husband using "fake money" and it generated some excitement among readers who wanted to try it themselves for Christmas 2010. This post is laying down the gauntlet: If you want to shop with fake money for this holiday season, it's time to get moving!

The "fake money" I used last year came from Swagbucks, an Amazon promotional credit, my PayPal balance, store credits, coupons, and free offers. This year, I have a bigger goal: Do all my holiday shopping with fake money.

Why do I feel that I can do this? Well, I have a lot more fake money this year. A little thing called Groupon gained steam since last holiday season, and I have earned many, many Groupon Bucks by promoting the excellent daily deals here and on my other blog. And I have a lot more points called SB from Swagbucks than I had last year too, thanks to readers who have signed up through me. (Seriously. Thanks, readers.)

Here's what I am doing now, before the first green leaf has changed color, to prepare for Dec. 25:

Sign up for free Amazon Prime, which will allow me to ship my fake-money purchases for free. Right now you can get a year of free Prime through Amazon Student (if you have a .edu email address), or three months if you sign up for Amazon Mom. That would end before Christmas, but you can extend it by a month every time you spend $25 on certain products.
Build up my SB. SB earned for your own searches build up gradually over time, but you can really rack them up if you install the toolbar and watch for new Swag Codes to be released, then use those to encourage your friends or contacts on Facebook and Twitter to sign up through you.
Trade in SB for gift cards — and not spending them. Since there are limits on how many gift cards you can redeem during each two-week period and on each day, it's a good idea to start trading in SB for gift cards now in order to shop later.
Watch Groupon with an eye for gifts. Groupon will give you $10 for every new member who signs up through you and makes one purchase — and some deals go for as little as $5. Once you have some credits, keep an eye out for items that will make great gifts. Don't tell the people on my list, but a lot of them will be getting cashews and such from The Nutty Guys this year, since it's been featured several times on various cities' Groupon deals. (There are lots of other daily deal sites too, many of which also pay affiliate fees or credits.)
Accumulating freebies that might go in gift baskets. Even though I'm busier than ever, I still stop into CVS and Walgreens to grab freebies using "the drugstore game," and some of the items I get are quite valued by those I love. My Grandma is notoriously hard to buy for — but her eyes lit up last Christmas when she got my basket of ThermaCare wraps and Metamucil.

So, who's with me? I'd love to hear your ideas on how to Christmas shop for free this year.

Disclosure: I used my referral links to the various stores and reward programs I used, so if you would like to sign up for any of them through this post, I will receive a small payment or credit.

This article is from Carrie Kirby of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

I Went Christmas Shopping With Fake Money

Carrie Kirby — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:04:32 +0000

Of all the post-holiday letdowns, the one I hate the most isn't the scale or the January weather or the household clutter: It's getting that credit card bill and finding out what my Christmas gifts from my spouse cost us.

In the spirit of avoiding that particular letdown, my husband and I made a new pledge this year: No use of the marital credit card to buy each other's presents. Instead, we would try to come up with gifts for one another completely off the books, using "fake money" like rewards points, rebates, store credits, pocket change, PayPal balances and coupons. Or we could make gifts for one another, but with three little kids running around, neither one of us has much time to be crafty.

I was about 97% successful in shopping for my husband with fake money. He was somewhat successful in shopping for me that way, and he's still working on it — he bought himself an extension by transferring some money from our savings account to his PayPal account, and is hoping to pay it back if and when some of his items listed on Ebay sell.

I got my husband a video game worth about $60, a CD worth $8, some bungee cords worth $8, and a cool wireless photo card worth about $60. Also, I filled his stocking with candy and nuts. And hey, I just remembered that I FORGOT to give him a $22 bag of Kona coffee I hid away in the freezer (bought on Free Shipping Day and with a rebate). Not an extravagant haul (I was much more spoiled, since besides a few modest gifts I received a long coveted Kindle e-book reader.), but not exactly lump of coal territory either.

Here is how I bought that stuff while only using about $3 of "real money":

Swagbucks. Late last year, I signed up for this program, which pays you to let Web search data aggregators eavesdrop on your Google searches. After about 14 months, I had accumulated around 700 points called SB, which I traded in for Amazon gift cards. I also transferred a little money to PayPal. I ended up getting $65 in Amazon gift cards, which paid for the video game, part of the CD, and I think something else I got for someone else. (The remaining $3 of the CD, which was marked down to $5 in an Amazon Lightning Deal, was the only money I spent on our credit card.)

Amazon Promotional Credit: I took advantage of one of Amazon's free magazine offers, where you can send in a form to request a credit for the value of the subscription instead. This put a $10 credit on my account, which allowed me to buy a pack of bungee cords marked down to $7.99 on another Amazon Lightning Deal.

PayPal: While my husband and I agreed that we would not use payment from our regular jobs, we each had received payments for random small transactions through PayPal. For instance, the pittance that I earn through Google Ads for my personal blog goes into PayPal, as do the payments and reimbursements I get for occasional mystery shopping jobs. Any Ebay sales we make also go into PayPal. (Confession: There was some money laundering going on here. I paid for several mystery shopping transactions and postage on an Ebay sale with our credit cards, but was reimbursed via PayPal.) I used PayPal to get the photo card and the coffee for my husband.

Store Credits: I used Register Rewards to buy a can of peanuts and some chocolates, I used CVS Extra Bucks to get him a huge Reece's Peanut Butter cup, and I used a $5 Catalina coupon at Jewel-Osco along with a coupon to get him some pistachios.

Coupons: I used $10 Fannie May coupon from the Sunday paper to get him half a pound of fancy chocolates (and paid the $1.50 remaining after the coupon with pocket change), combined manufacturer's coupons with a Walgreen's store coupon to get some free Toblerone bars, and used "buy one, get one free" Reece's coupons with a "buy one, get one free" sale to get some of those for free. I also gave my husband another $10 Fannie May coupon to spend on me, and while I was typing this I ate some of the half pound of chocolate-covered caramels it bought. Thanks, Epu, and thanks Fannie May, because these things are friggin' delicious!

I also used fake money to get gifts for some other people on our list; there were plentiful free photo items available through Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery and others, as well as various $10 off a purchase of $10 or more at stores. And, I got all our wrapping supplies for free: wrapping paper and tape from the Hallmark store using the generous $5 off $5 or more coupons they put out (now expired), and tissue paper and gift tags from CVS during a free-after-Extra-Bucks offer.

Meanwhile, my husband got me several books from his office book exchange without spending any cash. As for the Kindle and other goodies he got me, he did use cash and the cash transferred to his PayPal, but is planning to replace it. I have to cut him some slack since, as a frugal blogger, I hunt down bargains and freebies as my job, while he is stuck in an office most of the day and many evenings to boot.

I feel that this experiment in fake money shopping was successful, so we're going to go for it again next year, this time with a whole year to plan. Actually, we might try to get one another's birthday gifts with "fake money" as well. I'd love to get to the point where I could fund ALL my Christmas shopping with fake money; I'm not counting on it, but who knows? Here are some unturned stones that we could still try:

Resale income: I actually brought a bunch of maternity and children's clothing over to our local consignment shop in order to generate cash for my husband's gifts, but I have not yet collected the proceeds. Assuming I make a little cash there, I'll set it aside for future gifts. Also, I haven't gotten around to putting various household stuff up for sale.

Referral program earnings. I recently started referring friends to Alice.com, the Web site where you can buy toilet paper and stuff for regular prices and have it delivered free. I haven't earned a ton from this -- $21 in the first month -- but over the course of the year this could certainly add up to another video game. Another referral program that I haven't tried but want to is children's clothing seller Boden, which pays you $5 in store credit for every friend's address you hand over.

Rebates: I have been shopping through Ebates, Mr. Rebates and Shop at Home whenever I buy online, so I'm starting to have small balances accrue in those accounts. Most of them pay a check when you hit $20 or so.

All these little rebates and such don't seem much when they trickle in. That's why I like the idea of saving them all for one purpose -- they certainly seem worth the effort when I put them together and am able to make my husband happy without spending any of our hard-earned paychecks.

If any readers out there used creative means to gift their spouses this year, be it crafts, money laundering or the ever-appreciated "backrub coupon," I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Disclosure: I used my referral links to the various stores and reward programs I used, so if you would like to sign up for any of them through this post, I will receive a small payment or credit. And then I'll have more virtual pocket change to apply to the hubby's gifts next year, so I should really have him write you all some thank-you notes!

This article is from Carrie Kirby of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: