3 Simple Ways to Make Easy Money

Do you want to make some easy money?

It’s really fun to make a little extra cash for very little effort.

There are so many different ways to make extra, easy money at home today. I wish they had been available when I was younger, but that’s okay, I’m not too old to take advantage of money making opportunities. They aren’t just for the young.

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I still practice frugal ways and try to find simple ways to earn some money. Making use of cash back programs is just one of the ways we try to be money smart.

Some of my favorite ways to earn a little extra money require shopping. I’m not a big time shopper, but there are certainly many things that I need to buy each month.

There are programs available for making / saving money when shopping online as well as when shopping in the store. These are three of my favorite online cash back / savings programs for shopping online. I’ll share some ideas for saving on in-store shopping in a future post.

1. Swagbucks

Swagbucks is my absolute favorite simple way to make easy money. It has been around for a long time and it is FREE to join. I’ve been a member for several years and I regularly redeem my swagbucks. Swagbucks began as a search engine and provides you with swagbucks for certain online activities. The swagbucks can be redeemed for gift cards to a large (they have many partners) number of stores.

There are a multitude of activities you can do at swagbucks to earn swagbucks. The list includes shopping online (earn swagbucks when you shop at online stores), surveys, games, partner offers, polls, watch videos, do online searches, etc.

Here is what a recent day of earning swagbucks looked like for me:

1. I started out on the To Do List (circled in the picture below) and took the Daily Poll – that’s 1 swagbuck and it takes less than 30 seconds.

2. From the To Do List, I selected the Daily Search. I simply searched in their search bar for a couple of good vegetable soup recipes and a couple of other things I was interested in and after a couple of searches they rewarded me with 6 swagbucks – it took maybe 2 minutes altogether.

3. From the To Do List again, I selected Daily Watch and watched a few sets of videos and earned 5 swagbucks – this took maybe 20 minutes, but I did it while I was doing some cleaning.

4. From the To Do List, I selected Answers and completed a 7 minute survey for 36 swagbucks.

5. During the day, while I was online, I received an alert for a swag code which earned me another 2 swagbucks. This took less than 30 seconds.

Swagbucks sets a daily goal of swagbucks points to earn (see red circle at top of picture below). If you reach that number you’ll receive a few extra swagbucks for it, plus you’ll receive some for it again at the end of the month. If that goal is not too large, I’ll aim for it each day. Once I’m there, I stop. After all, I’m busy and have other things to do, but I like reaching the goal. This day the goal was 30, but because of the survey and the swag code, I actually earned 50 swagbucks for the day.

You may be wondering – how will I get money from those swagbucks? Well, once you’ve earned as little as 85 swagbucks you can redeem them for gift cards to stores. Also, each month they typically discount a few of the gift cards so instead of paying 2500 swagbucks for a $25 gift card you may be able to get it for 2200 swagbucks. This is typically when I redeem my swagbucks. They have gift cards for the stores that I usually shop at, so it is super handy and valuable for me.

We like to use our gift cards for “extras” (wants not needs) things. For example, I don’t typically buy books even though I love to read. However, sometimes there is a book that I really want. I will put it on my wish list at the store site and then when I earn a swagbucks gift card I redeem it for that store and order my book. That means I haven’t hurt our budget at all because I got the book with my free swagbucks.

We’ve used these gift cards for fishing supplies, dog food, and gifts, just to name a few things. It’s fun to see how many swagbucks we can earn in a month.

You can sign up for Swagbucks (it’s FREE) and start earning some easy money today!

2. Rakuten

I am a fairly new Rakuten fan. I actually signed up originally a couple of years ago (when it was ebates) and then simply ignored it. That was a big mistake because I missed out on a lot of cash back earnings during that time.

We’ve only just started using Rakuten seriously last month and we are hooked! It is such an easy program to use.

All you have to do is download the Rakuten extension app and when you shop, you start an Rakuten shopping trip (it will ask if you want to activate it – just click it to confirm and it will validate the trip). They have a large number of partner stores, so it’s very likely that a store that you regularly shop at online is one of their partners.

Shop as usual and you will receive a credit to your Rakuten account for a percentage of the order (Rakuten will tell you what the percentage will be when you activate the shopping trip) within a few days.

They’ll send you a Big Fat Check every 3 months, or if you prefer, they’ll deposit it into your PayPal account.

My experience was that the first big fat check was sent after my first two purchases with the program. It amounted to $5.69. It won’t buy much, but it is free and easy money since we were buying the items online anyway. They sent the check right away. That’s great service and it has encouraged me to see exactly how much we can earn with Rakuten.

We are trying a test this month to see how much we can earn with Rakuten in a typical month. We are trying to plan ahead and order things we need online instead of going to the store (or maybe even doing the free pickup at our local stores). We don’t have any big ticket items planned for purchase this month, so this should just represent how many dollars we could earn with Rakuten during an average month. This may prove to curb some of our spontaneous (ahem… unnecessary) purchases too. Yeah! Update: We used Rakuten last month for our online purchases and received almost $19 for our effort (which was just clicking the Rakuten button when we ordered). Although this may not seem like a lot of money, it will pay for a pizza date! We’re definitely going to keep using Rakuten!

3. Honey

There is a third program that we use to make easy money and that is Honey. It’s not a cashback program, but instead it helps you earn immediate savings. You simply download the browser extension and then shop as usual. When you are ready to checkout, Honey will automatically apply the best coupon code for that store. This can amount to a nice size savings on some shopping trips. We most recently used it to get 15% off an order for car parts.

These are 3 simple and easy money making / saving programs that we currently use to help us earn a little extra money each month. They are so simple to use and require very little effort on our part. Although it may not be a lot of money, in my humble opinion $25 here and $25 there is worth the effort. Plus, it’s a lot of fun just seeing how much money you can make or save with these types of programs. I do love tracking our savings.

I’d love to hear if you have a favorite cash back site, or if you sign up for one of these, let me know what you think and how it is working for you.

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