Save a Dime, Save a Lot

Our family has had times of plenty, and times of want. As we have traveled and journeyed together through life, we often find great ways to save money or redeem money. But, we hate to keep all of this information to ourselves. We want to share. Doesn’t everyone want free money? We thought so. But not everyone is willing to spend just a little bit of time (and we do mean a little bit of time) to save money or make money. It amazes me that people are willing to spend two plus hours watching a sports event on television, but are unwilling to spend five minutes to make a dime. It surprises me that people don’t want to spend a few minutes because they feel that saving a little money doesn’t make a big difference in their lives. Really? A quarter a week over 52-weeks is $13. I know that’s not a big deal. But, we have found ways to save or make at least $5 a week. Over the course of a year, that’s $260. We can find a lot of fun stuff for our family to do with $260. We think it’s worth a little time. The rewards can be great. Here are some of the things we’ve done to make an extra dime or two.

Grocery Rebate Apps: We have recently started using these apps to get cash rebates on groceries. It’s like using a coupon, only you receive money from these apps. And many of these apps give rebates on staples like eggs, bread, and milk. You don’t often find coupons for those. We have found the most success with Ibotta (making about $18 in two months). We also use Snap by Groupon (which gives a greater amount in rebates, but the rebates go quickly). We have only made $2 in a month using Snap, but we would have made more if we had scanned our purchases quicker. Lesson learned. Finally, we use Checkout 51. We have made $4.50 in one month using this app. Most of these can be cashed out at $10 or $20 and are sent to Paypal or your mailbox.

Savings Catcher: This is available exclusively for Walmart customers. When you shop at Walmart, you scan in your receipt barcode, and Saving Catcher does the rest. Many other local retailers sales are monitored. If you buy something at Walmart that is on sale for 30 cents cheaper at another store, you get 30 cents added to your Saving Catcher account. We have been using Saving Catcher for about three months, and have received about $6.50. It’s not a lot of cash, but there’s very little work on our part. And, we don’t shop at Walmart too often. If you are a regular Walmart customer, your cash rewards would likely be greater.

Gas Survey: Each week after grocery shopping, we get a receipt with a survey code. I have been taking the survey once a week. The reward is an extra 50 points toward gasoline. With our grocery store/gas card, we need 100 points to get 10 cents off per gallon. The survey, which takes at most five minutes to fill out, gets us half way to that discount. Since the grocery store gives us 1 point per dollar spent, we are able to get at least 10 cents off per gallon weekly. My gas tank usually takes about 12-14 gallons to fill, so we can save at least $1.20 every time we fill up.

Other Shopping Apps: We have discovered some other shopping apps that give us cash or points toward gift cards. Some of these are very generous. Yes, it always requires a little work to upload a receipt, or scan a barcode, but it doesn’t take that much time. We have been using Receipt Hog and Shop Kicks to get extra cash or gift cards on our purchases. We have also used The Coupon Sherpa to get a 25% off coupon at Payless Shoe Source when we needed new kids shoes. And, we have started using Bing Rewards,which gives us points whenever we use the Bing search engine. Bing gives us some gift cards for our searches. Since we already use the internet a lot for searches, why not get rewarded for it.

There are many other apps and resources we could use. And maybe in the future we will use those. But we like the ones we have found thus far. One of the great things about most of these resources is that we can get a little extra reward ($1 or so) for each friend we invite who joins and participates. So, if you are interested in any of these, let us know. We can give you the link to join, and you’d be helping us out, too.