Get 300 bonus SB when you sign up for Swagbucks in April

Spring is here, and there’s no better time to start earning free gift cards through Swagbucks!

All throughout April you can earn large bonuses when sign up as my referral on Swagbucks. Swagbucks is a rewards site where you earn points (called SB) for things you’re probably doing online already, like searching the web, watching videos, shopping, discovering deals, and taking surveys. Then you take those points and exchange them for gift cards to places like Amazon, M&S, or PayPal cash.

When you sign up through me this month, you can earn a 300 SB bonus! Here’s how:

1. Sign up using this link

2. Earn 300 SB total before May 1st, 2019. You’ll get a 300 SB bonus for it!

3. That’s it. It’s super easy, and Swagbucks is for real. I use it myself, and I’ve earned almost £3,000 to date. I use Swagbucks to buy gift cards for my favourite stores, like: M&S, John Lewis and Amazon. Then I can treat myself or my family at no cost!

Are you a Bank Tart?

Never heard the expression ‘bank tart’ before? Neither had I, until a few months ago! A bank tart is someone who repeatedly switches bank accounts, in order to take advantage of various offers from different banks. Often these are bonuses for switching to a particular bank, but sometimes they offer a monthly bonus for jumping through a few hoops. Those hoops tend to be things like setting up a certain number of direct debits, or paying a certain amount into the account each month. It’s vital that you check the terms and conditions of whichever one you have signed up for, to make sure that you fulfil all the criteria needed to obtain your bonus.

You can use sites like MoneySavingExpert to find out what the best current deals are. The word on the street is that there’s up to £800 available, for free – just for switching. So far we’ve taken advantage of £110 from the Cooperative Bank. We were going to stay with them and get £5 a month in addition, but given that they are about to go under (according to BBC news, it could happen at any time), we’ve decided to switch away immediately before we get into a tangled web with our finances.

Next up on our list is First Direct which is offering £125 to switch, plus once the account is open, you have the opportunity to open a regular saver account earning 5% interest up to a certain amount. There are other great deals from Halifax, Nationwide and Santander out there and more! It is possible to keep several accounts open and switch money between them, to meet the criteria of several accounts at once. I’m not sure if I’m up to that challenge or not at the moment. But I’ll keep you posted!

Switching was completely hassle free using the switching service and everything was done for us. Even down to the minor details of switching all our former payees and adding them into our new bank account, so that we didn’t have to. We were impressed and apart from our switch date getting put back by a few days – it went without a hitch.

So, come on – ‘fess up! Are you a bank tart or a switching virgin? My running total is £235 free cash currently. What’s yours?

Are you paying too much for your energy?

I think we all know that these days, we’ve got to make the effort to shop around to get the best deal. Often, there’s no point staying loyal to a provider – be it for insurance, energy, phone, broadband or anything else! I don’t know how many of you watched The Martin Lewis Money Show on ITV, but it should be on your must watch list. You can catch up via that link. I can personally credit Martin Lewis and his site MoneySavingExpert (MSE) with everything I’ve learned about saving money and making money since 2012. Again, I highly recommend you make some time to read all his advice. There is a lot of go through and I try to condense some of it onto my blog, but everyone is different and what works for me, may not work for you. However, everyone can benefit from checking whether or not they are overpaying for their household energy.

As MSE is impartial and a major consumer champion, they are not trying to sell your anything. Unlike going through a regular comparison site, who will take a cut – I believe MSE does not. So you should join and check out their Cheap Energy Club to see if you would benefit from switching. Most people on the TV programme were saving around £250 a year!

I have just done it and I am glad to say that my household is on the cheapest deal for us – a 1-year fix with The Cooperative Energy. We’ve actually been with them for 4 years now and they’ve consistently offered us good value and good service. They never try to sell us things we don’t need, they are very clear about how much we are spending and even contacted us to tell us we could get a better deal! I love being with a more ethical company and they are pioneering some great green initiatives too. I believe that a lot of the smaller companies are much better for their customer service. So why don’t you get checking and post back with how much you’ve managed to save?

Swagbucks Holiday Deals

Have you checked out today’s deals on Swagbucks? For anyone in the UK I don’t know how relevant these are, but I can see increased cashback offers on M&S, Argos, Currys, The Body Shop and Very to name but a few! I’d really recommend also checking out MoneySavingExpert’s Deals Predictor. Use this to work out when is the best day to buy the things you want to get maximum discounts! I’ll be keeping an eye-out as things ramp up towards Friday and over the weekend.

I’ve been talking about them a lot lately, Swagbucks is an easy, quick way to earn cash back and gift cards by shopping online or doing other everyday activities like taking surveys or watching videos. When you do those things, you earn points (called SB) that you redeem for PayPal cash or gift cards to places like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Starbucks, and more!  Just for signing up through me, you can earn a 300 SB bonus if you earn 300 SB before December 1st – if you spend at least £25 shopping through Swagbucks during that time, you’ll get another 200 SB bonus!

I am personally currently saving up all my gift cards for some larger purchases, including Christmas presents for my family. If you have family in the States like me, then you can buy USD gift cards for them. I personally use these Barnes and Noble gift cards a lot, as they are easy to email on.

So tell me, have you got any Black Friday purchases planned or do you hate the whole thing? Get in touch 🙂

Viewsbank- Survey Site

Viewsbank* is a survey site I visit every few days. They are generally not high payers, but they offer lots of short few minute long surveys that pay a few pence each. This adds up each day and then they have some higher paying projects a few times per year. They have recently added Toluna surveys to their site, so surveys are becoming more frequent. (You can sign up to Toluna on their own site, but I got so sick of the high number of screen outs that I prefer to do them through other sites that assess your eligibility before you start).

If you input when your insurances are up for renewal, Viewsbank will contact you just prior and offer to pay you for getting your insurance quotes! This is usually around £25 and I think it is worthwhile for  getting 6 quotes and something I will be doing anyway. This payment then makes it easy to cash out with them. They are reliable payers, but unless you are going to to their insurance quote work, it is unlikely to be worthwhile. They upped their minimum payment threshold to £12 last year and it would take me years to get to that doing just their micro surveys. Although you may find it different, especially if you do Toluna surveys through them.

*I will get 10p if you sign up through my link.

Earn money with Pinecone Research

Starting today, I’m going to start walking you through the survey sites I use to earn money online. These can be great earners, but there are a lot of survey sites out there and some are not so reputable, or pay poorly. I’m going to share with you my experience of using survey sites, starting with my highest earners. However this shouldn’t deter you from trying other sites – read online reviews about them first and decide whether you want to try them. This is because every person has a unique set of demographics and so, you might be suited to a different site.

Pinecone Research is a long-established company and to my knowledge is the highest paying. Pinecone do not recruit new members through their website or take unsolicited referrals. However, they post recruitment opportunities through banner ads on various unsolicited websites from time to time throughout the year. If you see one of these ads, you should take the opportunity to sign up! I think I searched for one, or noticed that they were recruiting on www.moneysavingexpert.com They have on occasion emailed a link to me when they have been looking for members, but not recently.

There surveys are very straight-forward and once you get the hang of them, you will find that they all follow the same format. They have just updated their website and now you can redeem your points for all manner of gift cards and items. I prefer to redeem for gift cards at the moment because I am saving up for something specific. But prior to that, I always cashed out via Paypal after each survey because you can redeem just £3, the amount you will be paid for every survey with them. As a bonus, sometimes they also send you the product that the survey was about to trial and give feedback. If this happens, you will be paid another £3 for the follow-up survey AND get the product for free! I reckon each survey takes between 10-15 minutes, so this is a very decent rate of pay.

The only downsides are that they don’t send surveys as regularly as some other companies, sometimes months go in-between, so you can’t rely on this as regular income like you can with some of the other sites I will share with you in the coming days. The upsides are that I have never had problems receiving payment quickly and accurately from them.

Frugal Living Tips

I consider myself a minimalist, starting the journey. I am also naturally very frugal which I think is helpful on this path. Today I want to share with you all, some of my tips for frugal living. I’m going to add 10 at a time, so as not to overwhelm you or I!

 

1. Squeeze every last drop out of that tube, if necessary cut it in half. You’d be amazed how much is left at the bottom of a tube of moisturiser or toothpaste!
2. When you get to the bottom of your liquid soap, add a tiny bit of water. That helps to get it all out and doesn’t dilute it too much.
3. Cook from scratch- you will always pay less for raw ingredients. Please, please don’t buy ready meals- they’re full of rubbish like excess salt and sugar.
4. Make do and mend. Learn how to sew, so you can darn that sock or glove, or sew a button back on!
5. Use a scoop to measure out your washing powder- most companies will even send you one for free!
6. Learn how to do basic DIY, like putting a bolt on a door or hanging shelves.
7. Always search around for the best prices (I think I’ll do another blog post on this soon), but there are lots of internet search engines to help you
8. Join up to coupon sites, like www.supersavvyme.co.uk
9. Join up to www.moneysavingexpert.com
10. Share things with others, or join a local swaps/ share group. This can really save you money on big items you might not use that often, like drills or lawnmowers.