Money Making “Schemes”

It is the holiday season and one thing that we always seem to want more of is money. Money for gifts, decorations, you name it and it costs money. For a couple of years now, I have taken to Pinterest to find ideas on how to make some extra money. However, do these really work? Well, I decided to try and find out. I did a month long test to see how much I could make. I took the 3 top suggested options and stuck with them. Here is what happened.

1. Surveys

One of the main pins that comes up is doing online surveys. The most popular survey app that I saw was Inbox Dollars. So, I signed up. I got a $5 bonus just for signing up. I started taking surveys, or I should say attempted to take surveys. I found that out of the 27 surveys listed for me in a day, I was lucky to qualify for one.

Most of these surveys are anywhere from 10 cents to 25 cents. They do have ones that go up to $2 or $3, but of course I never qualified for those. With this being a challenge, I decided to keep trying. It seemed like I was at a standstill. I made more off the “Billy Spin & Win” wheel than off of the survey’s (and those were 5 cents at a time).

So while some people claim they have made $300 or more doing surveys for a month, I only made $8.95. Which, sure is $8.95 more than I had to start with. However, you can’t even cash it out until you reach $30. All in all, it was not a win for me.

2. Cash Back For Shopping

Another very popular pin for making money is to use apps that give you cash back on the shopping you already do. The most popular app that I saw was Ibotta. I downloaded the app and signed up. For the month, I scanned all of my receipts. Most of them came from Target and usually had only one item that qualified on it. If I was ordering something online, I went through the Ibotta app and ordered through there to get my cash back percentage (which can take up to 90 days to get back- in my case it took over a month to get back my 22 cents from Home Depot). In a month’s time, I recieved $7.47 back on my purchases. Which, again, you cannot cash out until you meet the $20 threshold.

I am sure I could have made more, if money was not an object and I was spending a ton of it. However, we are a budget family. All in all, I would say this app doesn’t work quickly for people on a budget.

3.Writing

I have seen several pins about taking on Freelance writing jobs. About a month ago, I applied to a company that strictly hires for freelance work. It took 3.5 weeks for me to get a response. They did decide to accept me based on the sample that I sent them. I registered with their sites and everything they required. I have yet to get any work through them (though it has only been about 5 days). I am going to continue with this one and see what happens in the next month. You never know unless you try, right?

Overall, I feel like I wasted a lot of time. I would be curious to anyone who does make a lot out of any of these options, how they do it. How many hours are spent taking surveys in order to make $100 and up. It seems pretty farfetched to me.

-Jenn