BUY Christmas gifts without spending out of pocket - IDEA #3

I like to plan Christmas presents far in advance to make sure that I stay within our gift budget - one way to make sure you don't overspend (or worse, go into credit card debt) for Christmas is to find ways to buy presents without spending money out of pocket. I've got several ways of doing this, they really work and none of them require shoplifting or scams! I've purchased almost all of our childrens birthday and Christmas gifts for the past 2 years using some of these methods!

Have you heard of swagbucks? I kept hearing about this site and how you can earn giftcards to use on Amazon by completing swagbucks tasks. I decided to try it, and to my surprise it really worked. It isn't as lucrative as some of the other methods, but if you're willing to spend a couple of minutes every day, you can earn some $ in the form of gift cards to use on gifts.

Here is what I did on Swagbucks.com today:

Signed in to swagbucks toolbar (1 swagbuck – time spent: 10 seconds)

Voted on a daily poll re: which new movie I’d most like to see (1 swagbuck – time spent: 5 seconds)

Watched a 2 minute commercial for Heinekin (2 swagbucks), a 2 minute video about a video game (2 swagbucks), and a 2 minute commercial for Duck Tape (2 swagbucks) (Total of 10 swagbucks for videos - Total time spent: video play time was 6 minutes, but I was also checking my email while the videos played, so no time lost)

Clicked through a series of 5 no-obligation online “offers” (called NOSO) for things like insurance and healthcare, didn’t have to give any info, just click “skip” or “no thanks” (2 swagbucks – time spent: less than 1 minute)

So I wasted about 2 minutes of my time on earning 10 swagbuck points. You can do all of those things once a day, but that still doesn’t seem like much, since it takes 450 points to purchase a $5.00 Amazon gift card, but if you did only these few things every day for 45 days, you’d have your $5.00 gift card. Again, I realize that it doesn’t seem like you could earn much that way...

There are many other ways to earn a higher quantity of swagbucks, like taking surveys (anywhere from 10 to 1000 swagbucks) or reviewing commercials (swagbucks vary). Personally, I feel like these things take up too much time, and unless you really have nothing better to do, aren’t worth the trouble.

There are also a lot of opportunities to sign up for this or that and earn extra points that way (like sign up for Netflix and get 1000 swagbucks), but many of them require you to commit to something (like a magazine subscription) and they all require giving out your personal information (and they will take away your points if they catch you submitting fake name, phone number, etc). I avoid these, even though they award higher amounts of swagbuck points, because I don’t like giving out my personal info.

The best way that I’ve found to earn swagbucks quickly is by using the swagbucks toolbar when I search the internet. Bonus swagbucks (9 or 10) are awarded randomly as you do your regular searches. I usually earn between 20-40 bonus swagbucks this way on a daily basis, so that starts adding up!

I began using swagbucks about a month ago and I’ve earned enough swagbucks to redeem $20 worth of $5 Amazon giftcards, which I’ve already used to purchase 2 books. I kept hearing about swagbucks and it seemed ok, but I figured I’d try it out and see if it’s a scam before I recommended it. Yesterday I got the two books that I ordered from Amazon (with my swagbucks) in the mail, so I can say for sure that it works!

THE DOWNSIDE: It might be easy to get sucked into wasting time doing surveys and things like that on the swagbucks site, so try to limit yourself to a certain time-frame. Don’t feel like you have to do tasks that require you to enter personal information to companies (like to get 100 points for submitting your information for an insurance quote) – the telemarketer calls and junk mail probably won’t be worth it. Limit your email spam by setting up an email address just for ‘spam’ to use if you need to submit your email on this (or any) website.

As I mentioned, you can use your swagbucks points to purchase Amazon gift cards (and other things like gift certificates to restaurants, etc), but I prefer to get the Amazon gift cards because I can use them to buy anything on Amazon.com. They come in $5.00 or $20.00 denominations, but you can "purchase" multiple $5.00 cards with your points at one time. so if you have 900 swagbucks you can get two $5.00 gift cards. They don't mail physical cards to you, they come in the form of a code that you enter on the Amazon site like you would with any Amazon gift card. The big downside to this is that even after you "buy" gift cards with your swagbucks points, it can take up to 10 days for Swagbucks to give you your gift card codes.

If you're interested in checking it out, click on the picture below to link to the site (and of course I get bonus points if you click on this link and sign up!!!! LOL)