Budgeting Tips to Get out of Debt and Build Wealth

Recommended Paid Survey Sites:

Inbox Dollars
My Points
Mindfield

When I was a teenager, my friends and I went to a big mall, and just as we were heading to the food court for lunch, a lady in a skirt suit with a clipboard in her hand asked us if we would like to earn $3.00 each just for giving our opinion.  We were skeptical, but she assured us that we really would get the money, we just had to answer some questions.  So we agreed (hey, $3.00 would help pay for lunch, why not) and she led us upstairs to an office where we filled out a questionaire. In the end, indeed, we each got our $3.00.

So when I heard about the ability to earn a little extra cash by taking surveys online, I believed it could be an honest-to-gosh extra income earning opportunity.  I know any big company worth its salt does market research, and it’s worth it to them to pay for it if they have to.  I decided to give it a shot, knowing that all I really had to lose was an overflowing junk-mail filter and maybe identity theft.  Oh, and I might sacrifice a lot of time I could probably be spending doing things like washing dishes, homeschooling, or writing articles. But if it really could earn us a few extra dollars here and there, why not work it in somehow?

What I learned is there are four basic types of survey-taking websites out there.

Rewards/Points Survey Websites

These are kind of fun, but time-consuming.  Yet they also seem to have a good potential of eventually paying out.  Features of a points-based site include:

* Some easy offers to get you started building up a few hundred points in your account, including answering basic information about your profile, simple surveys, no-strings sweepstakes entries and writing short reviews.

* Some free-trial offers, in which you have to sign up for a service using your credit card before you get the points credited to your account.

* One has a search toolbar that also awards you some points every month if you use it enough.

* Some points sites will exchange your points for your choice of gift cards or cash. Some points sites let you buy various items (kind of junky I think) with your points.

If you don’t mind taking the time to sift through and search for the points opportunities, you might enjoy these and have something to show for it in a month or two, when you accumulate enough points to cash out.

Here are some points-based survey websites to try:

MyPoints
Zoompanel – this is the one with kind of cheap prizes, with a few exceptions.

Cash-Based Free Trial Survey Websites

Instead of points, these sites add up the dollars in an account for you.  You still have to reach a certain minimum threshhold before you get paid.

* They get you started with personal profile surveys and a few simple freebie offers so you have a small balance in your account to tease you.

* Then you get a screen with a list of surveys and dollar amounts (some of them substantial, like $64, others just $0.25-$0.50).  You get a token survey to fill out but you don’t get the cash reward put in your account unless you sign up for a free trial or other offer using your credit card.

I like this kind of website only because it is so straight-forward.  And I also find that some of the offers are kind of nice.  (For instance, a trial of Gamefly or Netflix or Blockbuster, or a Free Credit Report or Gevalia Kaffe.)  As long as you MAKE SURE you cancel the subscriptions you don’t want (and if you’re trying to pay off debt, you better not be signing up for anything you haven’t budgeted for) you can get some money from these deals.

Here are some cash-based survey websites to try:

Surveyhead

Full-Fledged Marketing Research Companies

These websites reminded me of the lady in the mall, willing to pay you for your time to get your opinion/personal information.  You can identify them by the sparse, clean look and the lack of any up-front cash or reward offers.  You fill out their profile surveys in the hopes that someday they will contact you to be part of a survey panel, it is by invitation only.  I believe these are worth a try.  It may be a while before you get anything from them, but you might as well get on the list.  Here is one you may want to consider:

Mindfield

Spammy Pseudo Cash-Paying Survey Websites

Here is where you can get suckered in, if nothing else, to wasting a lot of time.  You get screen after screen of offers inside of offers, dangling such tantalizing prizes as a $500 gift card to Target or Amazon, or a $1000 Visa gift card, or they’ll pay off your mortgage etc.  It was obvious from the look of these sites that they were probably not for real, but I decided to go through the paces on one.  I signed up for a couple of free-trials because it said I would get a $500 Sears card if I did, and explained that they could afford to do this because these advertisers were paying for it.

Okay, fine.  I thought that $250 each was a lot to pay for a new free-trial sign-up, but I wanted Gevalia anyway.  I only needed to sign up for two offers on that page, it said, to get my gift card.

OK, so I signed up for Blockbuster too.  Then I clicked on the bottom to go to the next page, only now I had to sign up for two MORE offers, and it was page 2 of 3.  I did not sign up for any other offers, but clicked the link on the bottom as if I had.  It brought up a third page of offers, of which I was to select two more.  So again I clicked the link on the bottom, and it took me to the “reward” page.

The Sears $500 gift card was not mentioned, but there was a list of several other “rewards”, including the $1000 Visa card.  Sure, I thought, give me the Visa gift card.  I clicked on that, which brought up another offer just like the one I had taken to get into this thing to begin with, saying I would get my $1000 card as soon as I filled out the following survey and met the conditions of the offer.

In other words, it is a never-ending cycle of offer after offer, none of them actually paying out a damn thing.  I did not even get the $1.50 reward on the cash-based site that led me to this, which made me take that supposedly legitimate site off my list too.

So, there are a handful of sites you can trust if you would like to start getting paid for taking surveys.  It won’t make you rich, but if all you get out of it is a gift card or a small check every few months, what the heck, every little bit of money helps pay off those debts!

Posted By: Increasing Your Income, Taking Surveys For Cash by Darcy