One of the best ways to pay off debt more quickly is to snowflake money toward your debt payment. Finding little ways to earn some quick cash can make your debt disappear much faster!
I’ve been involved in the following three programs for a while, and while you won’t get rich off any of them, each provides a way to earn a few cash or gift card rewards in your spare moments.
Earn Money With Cash Crate
When you sign up for Cash Crate, you get paid for completing offers, taking surveys, and referring other people.
The best way to get started after signing up is to select offers that are 100% free and then sort by rating. That will give you the easiest offers and surveys to complete, and you don’t have to worry about getting randomly charged for things. I never do offers that require credit card input. That’s just asking for trouble.
I also like to do surveys. They don’t pay much, but even if you make a dollar a day, that’s $30 a month that you can use to snowflake toward debt repayment!
If you do sign up for Cash Crate, I highly recommend that you get an email address that you use exclusively for surveys and offers. You will get a TON of email, and you don’t want it cluttering up your regular inbox.
Earn Gift Cards With MyPoints
I’ve been using MyPoints for a long time. With MyPoints, you don’t directly earn cash, but you earn points that you can redeem for gift cards from a wide variety of businesses. In the past I’ve selected gift cards from Target, Walmart, Amazon, and Bath & Body Works.
In order to use the gift card money to pay off debt, I select a card from a place like Walmart, use the money for food, and transfer the equivalent amount of money to my bank account to make a payment on debt.
Earning points from MyPoints is really straightforward. If you shop through their site with one of their partner stores, you earn points. In your spare time, you can open their emails and click through to the partner sites for points. No purchase necessary. And you can also take surveys for points.
The points you earn add up surprisingly fast. It doesn’t take long at all to earn a $10 gift card!
As with Cash Crate, though, you’ll want a separate email address to use with MyPoints, because you’ll be receiving a LOT of email.
Earn Prizes and Gift Cards With Swagbucks
Swagbucks is much like MyPoints in that you earn points (or swagbucks, as they’re called), which you redeem for prizes or gift cards. It can be a great way to save up for a needed purchase or for purchasing gifts for people.
The easiest way to earn Swagbucks is to do internet searches, using the Swagbucks search engine. It doesn’t cost you anything, and you’re probably already doing internet searches, so it doesn’t take any extra time. Each time you search with the Swagbucks search engine, you have a chance to win Swagbucks.
I use the Swagbucks search plugin for Firefox. I just keep my search box set to Swagbucks, and every time I do a search, I have a chance to win Swagbucks! In fact, I have over 1500 Swagbucks sitting in my account right now, and I can’t even remember how I got them!
You can also earn Swagbucks for shopping with their partners or recycling your old cell phone or video gaming system. I love a company that rewards me for recycling!
Do you have experience with any of these programs? I’d love to hear about it!
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I use Swagbucks and MyPoints, but I found MyPoints emails did better coming to my regular inbox. Then I woud click on an email, get points and be done with it.
Among the easiest ways to make extra money without any effort, I would add to use your cash back rewards for day-to-day expenses (i.e. gas, grocery, utility bills)
I’ve been using Swagbucks since you first posted about it. I have yet to redeem any of my Swagbucks, but they aren’t going anywhere. What is the best way to redeem them for gift cards such as from Amazon? If I want to make a $50 purchase on Amazon, do I need to redeem Swagbucks for five $10 Amazon cards?
Angelsong, I don’t know if it’s the best way, but I always redeem my bucks for giftcards.
I’ve been using cash crate for about a year now. It consistently brings in $70-80 a month – or more – but the real money from cash crate is in the referrals. As you mention, don’t forget to setup and use a separate email for cash crate and other services. You will get a ton of email.
Thank you for the tips and brief explanations of how to earn the most amount of points. That definitely helps. I am determined to use these methods to earn for debt purposes!