Plink - Earn Points for Dining and Shopping Offline

Plink is really simple to setup, and even easier to use. Plink allows you to earn points for dining out and shopping offline. You don't need any special rewards card either, because Plink integrates with your current credit card or debit card. The way this happens, is when you register with Plink you supply the login credentials to your credit cards website. They use the same level of encryption that banks use to ensure that your information is secure. Then once a day, your transaction history can be pulled from your credit card, and if you have shopped at any of the qualified places you get points. It's completely transparent to the user.

You can only have a maximum of 5 vendors selected at a time to receive rewards from, though you start out with only 3 slots. You unlock one slot by inviting a friend to the program, and you unlock one slot the first time you make a qualifying purchase. Each vendor has two different tiers of rewards, which I lay out below. Here's how to understand the formatting I will use: X points/Y dollars means you get X amount of points if you spent Y or more dollars.

Restaurants

• Red Robin - (150/$15 or 400/$40)
• Outback Steakhouse - (200/$20 or 600/$60)
• Quiznos - (100/$10 or 250/$25)
• Taco Bell - (70/$5 or 150/$15)
• Arby's - (70/$5 or 150/$15)
• Buger King - (70/$5 or 150/$15)
• Dunkin' Donuts - (70/$5 or 150/$15)

Theaters

• Edwards Theatres - (150/$15 or 400/$40)
• United Artists Theatres - (150/$15 or 400/$40)
• Regal Cinemas - (150/$15 or 400/$40)

Other

• 7 - Eleven - (100/$10 or 250/$25)
• 1-800-Flowers.com - (350/$35 or 600/$60)

You can cash out after you accumulate 500 points with a $5 giftcard to Amazon, Tango, Walmart, Kohls, Facebook, or donate $5 to the Red Cross for Hurricane Sandy victims. You can cash out 1,000 for a $10 card to Barnes and Noble, Macy's, Overstock.com, or Zappos. American Eagle cards start at 2,500 points for $25.

Swagbucks - Lower Prices, Unlimited Rewards

Starting November 1st until the end of the year, expect lower prices on all gift cards (except the $5 Amazon card which I'll explain) in the Swag Store. Your Swag Bucks will be worth more than ever now. Swagbucks has announced 3 new changes that are sure to excite any Swaggernaut.

1. All gift cards' prices have been set to 100 Swag Bucks per dollar. So that $5 Walmart card is now 500 Swag Bucks instead of 659. The only exception is the $5 Amazon gift card, which remains at the awesome low price of 450 Swag Bucks.
2. There is now a $15 Amazon card valued at 1,500 Swag Bucks. Previously, the next lowest value after $5 was the $25 card.
3. No longer limited to redeeming just 5 of each prize per month (with the exception of the $5 Amazon gift card). Just in time for the holidays, now you can redeem as many cards as you can earn points for.

This really helps out the people that earn enough Swag Bucks to claim their limit of the five $5 Amazon cards before the month is even halfway over. It means you'll be able to redeem more cards, quicker. Tomorrow I will be able to order a $25 Amazon gift card, even though right now I am 570 Swag Bucks short of getting one today.

Swagbucks - The Big Earners

By now, you should be a little bit familiar with Swagbucks. I've already gone over several methods that require almost no effort and very little effort. Now I'm going to cover the methods that require your full attention, but in most cases reward you well above just a few points. I'll start with the least rewarding for their time and end with the most rewarding.

Games

If you venture into the gaming section of Swagbucks, you'll see a wide variety of games you can play. You'll get rewarded small amounts of Swag Bucks as you play, up to a maximum of 10 per day. This isn't a very big earner, but it will help you fill in your daily meter if you are trying to meet the goal it sets for you each day. I like to play the word games because they go by pretty fast and I seem to earn my Swagbucks more quickly this way.

Coupons

Powered by coupons.com, you can print coupons out and for each one is redeemed you earn 10 Swag Bucks. It's very easy to use - all you do is look through the available coupons, and if you see one you like then you put a check in the box where it says [ ] <<< CLIP. The coupons are really great for saving; here are a few examples: $1 off any two Welches juice, $0.50 off two cans of Del Monte tomatoes, or $1 off Angel Soft 12-pack or larger toilet paper. Save and earn at the same time by using these coupons.

Trade-Ins

You can enter any books, games, gaming systems, and their accessories. If it is something they are looking for they offer to buy it from you and you get paid with Swag Bucks. To give you an idea, I just grabbed a book from my bookshelf The C Programming Language and ran the ISBN number through Swagbucks and I could sell it to them for 960 points.

Tasks

These are a mixed bag. Their difficulty and time commitments vary as well as the amount of Swag Bucks each task awards. New tasks are constantly added and older ones removed, so it's hard to give you a consistent idea of what to expect. As of this writing, there are tasks up that range from 2 to 14 Swag Bucks. Some tasks are simple: Search google for articles and retweet them! currently rewards 10 points and only takes about 5 minutes. There are some tasks that have you search Google for a certain keyword, have you look for a particular url, and then ask you questions about it such as it's rank on the Google search or if the snippet Google displayed accurately set your expectations as to what the page contains.

Surveys

Pretty much every GPT (Get Paid To) site has some form of surveys to complete and Swagbucks is no exception. There are two different places where you can find surveys. The first and most immediately obvious is to click Earn and select Trusted Surveys. You'll see survey's listed that range from 10 to 200 Swag Bucks. The other way to access surveys is to click on Special Offers instead of Trusted Surveys. This will bring up all the offers, separated into tabs by what backend powers them. Select the Peanut Labs tab and you'll see several surveys listed for around 50 to 80 Swag Bucks. The thing to keep in mind is just because the survey is there doesn't mean you will qualify for it. If you don't qualify you'll be kicked out after a handful of questions and given 1 Swag Buck for trying.

Daily Deals

To find these, click on Earn and select Daily Deals. You'll see mainly a mix of Tippr and Groupon deals. If you access them through Swagbucks you'll usually earn around 50 Swag Bucks. I used this recently to get $30 worth of pizza from a local pizza place for $9, plus I got my 50 Swag Bucks! I occasionally browse through here to see if there is anything I'd probably purchase anyway or to look for really good deals.

Special Offers

From the Earn menu select Special Offers. You'll see several tabs, each with a bunch of offers for a very wide range of points. This is where the biggest earners are. For instance, a free trial of Netflix will net you 1300 Swag Bucks. There are videos you can watch that will reward 1 or 2 points each. Some offers just want you to go to their website and sign up for their newsletter. There really are way to many offers to list here, but if you wanted to sign up for Swagbucks, make a little bit of money, and then never touch it again; this is the way to go. Some offers can take a few days to credit or may have a limit on how long you must keep the trial account before you close it (Netflix was 3 days), but that's usually stated very clearly on the offer.

As you can see, there a bunch of ways to earn Swag Bucks all with varying levels of time commitment. You can earn slow or you can earn fast. It's entirely up to you. If you have any questions or feel as if I didn't cover any particular section well enough please leave a comment and I will be glad to help you.

Make Your Own Laundry Detergent and Save

I want this site to be as much about ways to save money as it is to earn money. This is the first guide in what will hopefully be many more to come. Me and Julie have been using our homemade laundry detergent for years now. It's extremely cheap and it works just as well as commercial detergents. To give you an idea of just how much cheaper, here is some math. I'll compare it to Tide.

• 5 gallon bucket with lid: $1.17
• Washing soda: $3.24
• Borax: $4.39
• Fels-Naptha bar: $0.97

Total cost: $9.77 + $0.73 tax = $10.50

We're already saving money compared to buying a single bottle of Tide, which is $12.87 after tax. The Tide is 64oz and says it lasts for 100 loads. One serving of our homemade detergent makes 10 gallons (1280oz) which is 20 times the amount of the tide, so it should last for 2,000 loads. Twenty bottles of Tide will cost you $257.40 after tax. After you use all 10 gallons up, to make more all you'll need to do is buy another 97 cent Fels-Naptha bar.

Here's how you can make some yourself. It only takes about 15 minutes to do,
Ingredients:

1. 4 Cups - hot tap water
2. 1 Fels-Naptha soap bar
3. 1 Cup - Washing Soda (must be sodium carbonate)
4. ½ Cup Borax

Directions:

1. Grate bar of soap and add to saucepan with water. Stir continually over medium-low heat until soap dissolves and is melted.
2. Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of hot tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved. Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken.
3. Stir and fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser half full with hot water and then fill rest of way with the soap. Shake before each use. (will gel)
4. Optional: You can add 10-15 drops of essential oil per 2 gallons. Add once soap has cooled. Ideas: lavender, rosemary, tea tree oil.

• Works well in traditional or HE machines.
• Low sudsing. It is the ingredients in the soap, not the suds, that does the cleaning.
• Clumping and geling of the detergent is normal. Stir before putting in dispenser, and shake before each use.
• Use 1 capful of detergent for a normal sized load.

Click to Give - Give to Charity for Free!

This review is a little different from the others. It is not about how you can earn money, but about how you can help others in need. The way it works is there are ads you click. You can click on each ad once a day. Each time you click on an ad, a small amount of revenue is generated. I don't see the amount specified on their website, but on most PTC (pay to click) websites the payout is usually $0.005 or $0.01. Usually that money goes to you, the clicker, but with Click To Give that money is sent to a charity. I just timed myself clicking on the ads and it literally only took 13 seconds to click all six ads. I think you can spare half a minute of your day.

You have to register before you can click, but you never even have to confirm your e-mail. There is also a rewards program, but instead of gift cards and merchandise you spend your points to give even more to charity.

These are the 6 ads and the charity each one supports:

Animal Cruelty - ASPCA
Feed the poor - Feed the Children
Stop child abuse - Childhelp
End homelessness - The National Alliance to End Homelessness
Impact kids cancer - The Children Cancer Center
Sponsor children - Romina G Mendieta Montano

Something else that bears mentioning is that there are other ads on this site. Normal ads, meaning you don't have to click them. They use these ads as a means to generate revenue to run the site so that all the money generated from your clicking can go straight to charity. Please add Click To Give to the whitelist of any adblocker you may have running. Additionally if you are using TopLine, you will want to disable it for this site as well. To do this, go to your account display settings and add clicktogive.com to the excluded domains. Make sure you click Save All Changes when you are done.

Not a Get Rich Quick Scheme

I want to reassure anyone reading this that what I am posting about are not "get rich quick" schemes. In fact, at best, I am probably only making minimum wage and possibly lower. However, I don't have a job, and I still made $325 in a month! It may not be a lot of money, but it's way better than no money. Right now I've got a fairly long list of sites that I view and participate in every day, and I still find time to do things with my wife (at least when she's not swamped with school work), and search for a job. Sometimes I'm curious as to how much I could make from these methods if I woke up every morning and worked at them from 8 - 5 and only taking a lunch break. Maybe I'll try it for a few days sometime and see how it goes, but for right now that's not the plan. I honestly don't think I could stand doing this 8 - 9 hours a day.

I started this as a way to make a some money while I don't have a job. I definitely plan on continuing some of what I've been doing even after I find one. It's not a ton of extra money, but it's enough to pay for my Christmas shopping. Having some extra money is nice. You can see below what I've earned in about a month's time. The Amazon cards are a combination of Swagbucks, Superpoints (review for this one coming soon), and Bing, and the bottom image is from mTurk.

my Amazon gift card balance

$264.55 in one month from mTurk

Bing - Search to Earn Credits

In case you haven't heard of it, Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It is a re-vamped and re-branded MSN Search. If you've never used it, it's actually pretty decent. It provides results that are on par with Google's in my opinion, and it's definitely improving. If you want to try a side by side comparison I suggest trying out Bing It On. I tried several search results on there and was surprised to see Bing come out the winner in 3 out of 5 of them, and the other 2 were ties.

As an incentive to use their search engine, Microsoft has started a rewards program. To sign up, you link either your Facebook or Microsoft account. When you first start out, there is a "tour" you can take of Bing with various different things to click on that all reward credits. After that though, the main way to earn credits is through searching. You get 1 credit per 2 searches up to a maximum of 15 credits per day (20 when you get your status to gold). There is also a "daily offer" which is basically just a special search, but you get an extra credit when you click it.

There are not a whole lot of rewards to choose from, but it's very easy to cap your credits each day. Just head over to the Bing rewards page and click the daily offer. From there, just click on different related searches on the side until you get your credits for the day. The best reward is probably the $5 Amazon gift card. You can see in my screen shot that I had 76% of the needed 525. Since I took that I have cashed in for my $5 card which I received the next day and I am now 12% towards my second card.

There are 3 status levels - member, silver, and gold. Getting to silver and gold is easy, but it takes a little bit of time. There really isn't a benefit of silver over member except for a one time 50 credit bonus. Gold however gets 5% discount on Microsoft points, 5% discount on Xbox Gold subscription, and a 10% discount on all other items. So that $5 Amazon card that used to cost 525 credits becomes 475 credits.

Again, like several other methods I've talked about, you aren't going to be making a ton of money from this. However; it's easy, doesn't take a lot of time out of your day (2 - 3 minutes usually), and you get a free Amazon gift card every few weeks.