How to Recover from Holiday Spending Using Your Phone

 

Did you find yourself spending a little more than you had anticipated over the Holidays?It’s easy to do, especially when you want to give all your friends and family the perfect gifts. Well today I have an easy way for you to recover from your holiday spending from the convenience of your mobile phone.

Swagbucks is the web’s most popular rewards program that gives you free gift cards and cash for the everyday things you already do online. My regular readers will know about this, since I write about them often as they are my main online earning opportunity. I am certain that there are still plenty of you reading this who haven’t yet taken the plunge and signed up!

Whenever you shop, watch videos or search the web, Swagbucks gives you points called SB. You can use your SB to redeem gift cards to hundreds of your favorite stores. With the Swagbucks mobile site, answer and SBTV apps I can use my spare minutes to earn free gift cards on my phone! I leave the apps below running when I’m home and on Wi-Fi. So my phone is earning, whilst I get on with my life! Like the Swagbucks website; I can also rack up SB by shopping, answering surveys and downloading free apps.

Here are some quick tips to get your started:

• While you wait for the coffee to brew, download free games and other apps through the Discover tab: 20 SB
• During commercial breaks, take a featured survey or fill out your survey profile: 60-100 SB, and sometimes more!
• While standing in line at the supermarket, answer the daily poll: 1 SB
• When you’ve finally made it to the gym, watch style, tech and celeb news through the SBTV app: 2 SB for every 10 videos
• Just as you’ve put dinner in the oven, your Swagbucks app tells you there’s a new Swag Code!: 3 SB
• Before you go to sleep, use the Swagbucks app to shop from your favorite stores. You deserve it!: 100 SB

By downloading the Swagbucks mobile apps, I could earn a free £5 gift card by the end of my week. Who knew playing on your phone could be so productive?!    There are 6 apps:

1. SBTV
2. Sportly
3. Lifestylz
4. EntertaiNow
5. MovieClips
6. IndyMusic

So you can instantly start earning your way to free gift cards. It’s 100% free to download and easy to use. They are all available for both iPhone and Android devices. They often give out bonus rounds too, so there are extra earning opportunities. It really is a case of the little things soon add up.

How to buy a brand new Siemen’s fridge/freezer for free!

OK, so this month has been killer for us financially. We are doing major renovations on our house – now these were planned and budgeted for. However, then we found out one of our pets has a terminal illness cue a small fortune in vet’s bills. The kind where they give you a quote and it ends up being double. Now I wouldn’t change anything because our pets are part of the family, but if I didn’t save money like it’s going out of fashion – we would not have been able to pull these kinds of sums out of a hat. So when on top of all of this, our fridge/freezer decided to say goodbye – we could have been turning to Freecycle or worse, trying to do without. Or I suppose actually, most people would just put it on a credit card and end up paying many times the item’s original price. I’m writing this post to show you exactly where a little bit of on-line earning can get you in just a few months. I bet I’m not the only one facing unexpected strains on their finances, or you might just want to avoid getting into debt over Christmas.

I was just able to buy this Siemen’s Fridge/Freezer from John Lewis for free! Yes, you read that correctly- FREE! (If you are reading this tomorrow 29/09/16 onwards, then unfortunately their great deal will have ended. But here is something similar on Amazon and you can save up Amazon vouchers from all of these sites towards your purchase).

I want to show you something really tangible, more so than me just giving you the figures for what I earn online. Although, this fridge/freezer represents less than half of what I can earn online each month, just to give you an idea. But I’m not sharing this to boast, I’m sharing this because if I can do it – you can too! You can effectively give yourself a pay rise and make thousands of pounds every year, from the comfort of your sofa or bed!

The majority of my gift cards which were put towards this purchase came from Swagbucks, with a little from Pinecone, a little from a site called Valued Opinions (comment or message me if you want a referral link, as it must be sent to your email address) and 1 voucher from The Wise Society (comment of message me if you want to join up, if they ask for the name of your referrer and I will give you my name. I am not currently certain if they are taking new members). I will aim to write a little more about those last two survey sites ASAP. The small remainder was covered by sites like Newvistalive and Populuslive which pay in cash.

I was lucky enough to catch the last day of a deal offering a 3-year extended warranty for free, taking it to 5 years in total, free disposal of my old appliance (normally £9), £70 cashback which I was given instantly off the purchase price at the checkout and free delivery which is also standard on any item over £50. John Lewis comply with the UK Government’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations which came into force in 2007. This means that all recyclable elements of our old appliance will be recovered to make new consumer goods. I also love the fact that John Lewis offer eco delivery slots, so I was able to choose a time for delivery when they are already in my area – meaning that more fuel is saved. How very Zero Waste of me!

I am looking forward to receiving my fridge/freezer next week – not least because it will work, but it is an A++ rated appliance and should only cost about £22.50 per year to run. I don’t know what our current appliance rates at, but it’s around 10 years old and undoubtedly won’t be as efficient. I hope that this appliance lives a long life, as I hate the throw away and disposal nature of our society. We inherited our last appliance, so we didn’t have any choice, but it was a cheap brand not known for their longevity. Here’s hoping we have made a better choice. I know none of this makes our purchase ideal, but we are doing our best, along with having chosen an ethical retailer who is doing their best.

I hope this post encourages you to start using some of the methods I have mentioned recently. I will be posting about a lot more and although it seems overwhelming at first, just try to incorporate 1 at a time. Once you’ve built it into your daily routine, you can add another. Until it just becomes normal to check these sites in your spare time. I hope that by starting in the order I am listing them, you will get some good earners in place quickly and see the fruits of your labours. Please comment and let me know how you are getting on! I would love to hear how others are being helped by my posts. That’s all for now folks!

Populus Live – Survey Site

Populus Live is another great survey site. The advantages of this site are that they are amongst the highest paying out there. The surveys come relatively frequently, I get at least 3 per week I would say and often more. Their rule is that they pay you £1 for every 5 minutes of your time. Most of the surveys are between 5-10 minutes long, so you can easily fit them in to your day. Occasionally you get longer ones which are obviously nice, as they pay more!

The disadvantages of this site are that you are required to earn £50 before you can be paid. You must be paid by cheque and you have to wait for this to be sent to you, by post which normally takes at least a month after you have reached the payment threshold. They do screen you out relatively frequently, but usually early on in the survey. They also have a hugely irritating template layout for their surveys which makes them very slow to load. In addition, they have even more vexing sets of questions to test that you are paying attention which basically feel like they are ‘trying’ to catch you out. However I put up with this due to the high payment for each survey.

Overall, I’d urge you to give this site a go since they pay well for surveys completed. If you’d care to share your experiences with the site, then please get in touch!

IPSOS i-say- survey site

IPSOS is a pretty recognisable name in market research, at least I had come across them in the UK thanks to IPSOS MORI polls, doing social research on behalf of the Government. I felt very comfortable signing up to them. For consumers, they run a site called IPSOS i-say which conducts market research- usually in the form of surveys, with occasional product trials throw in if you are eligible.

They offer frequent and reasonably well paid survey via their i-say site. You get paid a number of points depending on the length of the survey. Once you have 1380 points, you can either redeem for a voucher, or donate the money to charity.

If you complete a high percentage of the surveys they send out, you can get bonus ‘loyalty’ points. I cash out £10 with this website usually every month, sometimes more (especially if they run an online research community) and I complete virtually every survey they send me.

I can’t offer you a referral link for this one, but if you would like to be referred please contact me below and give me your first name and email address. Then I will be able to send you a link directly. I would get a small allocation of extra points for doing so.

This company is very reliable in crediting surveys and they even pay points when you are disqualified. However, their vouchers do take around 1 month to reach you via post which is annoying. However they have always arrived in the end.

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.