Frugal Engineered Travel
While using credit card rewards is one method for earning money to spend while on travel, those points & miles are best spent using transfer portals for airfare and hotels. But, there are other hustles you can do on the side in your free time to earn a little extra cash for travel.
ONLINE SURVEYS
Online surveys are good when you have extra time to remain focused on answering questions a researcher needs to collect data on. Many options are available for this, but some have a better Return on Investment than others.
The most known for online surveys is probably Swagbuck, but I do not believe the juice is worth the squeeze on this one. I have tried it and have wasted a lot of time on surveys that I get disqualified for and receive only minimal rewards for the time spent. I feel Swagbucks has its place in a well-rounded play for making extra money online but it is not with the surveys play.
The best online survey site I have found to date is Prolific (https://www.prolific.com/). I've been using this site for 6 months and I have been able to average earning an extra $40 a week for doing surveys that can last between 1 minute and 1 hour. Some surveys will have phases across multiple weeks and can pay quite well as long as you perform all required surveys. With 2 young kids at home, I only have small breaks after my 9 to 5 job to do surveys so I am not able to maximize the cash I could be getting from performing these surveys. If you are going to give it a try, for best results you will want to check for available surveys during the day time if you can, or before 7 pm ET. I have found that after 7 pm ET, available surveys become nonexistent. Their cash-out process is also very easy to link to PayPal and receive the funds in under 10 mins. I will have a full review and tutorial in a future post.
PLAY ONLINE GAMES
This method for earning extra cash is good for when you are on the go somewhere, and can not be fully engaged with survey questions. As with online surveys, many applications are available to earn but some provide a better Return on Investment than others.
My usual application for earning rewards for online gameplay is Swagbucks. This option for earning extra travel cash has a smaller Return on Investment than surveys with Prolific, but can serve as a filler when you have downtime. I will typically focus on these at nights before bed or on the weekends when there are very few surveys available. You will need to be selective when playing these games; to not waste a lot of time for very little reward. I will select a game based on its available reward points, and work on playing the game for a couple of days. If gaining levels requires too much effort to advance levels; I will delete the app and move on to try to find a better rewarding app. Swagbucks can be exchanged for gift cards or PayPal payments. My preferred reward is Paypal where I will move the funds to Paypal savings which acts as a High Yield Savings fund.
Other options in this space include PlayTest PRO, Benjamin, & KashKick.
CASH BACK FOR ONLINE SHOPPING
Applications such as Rakuten allow you to receive cash back for online purchases. Rakuten also provides a browser plug-in, which will notify you when you are on a website that has an offer available. If using a phone, you will need to navigate to a vendor directly via the Rakuten app to gain cashback. Rakuten can be configured to earn membership rewards with American Express instead of cash. I will cover this in a separate post. This is my preferred method for using online shopping cashback.
CASH BACK FOR IN-STORE SHOPPING
There are many options available, and many can be stacked together to maximize the cashback. The first play is to use your local shopping store application to add the available digital coupons to save money on your purchase. The second play is to use applications like Swagbucks, Fetch, and Ibotta to earn rewards. Swagbucks and Ibotta require you to load digital coupons much like your local store. Once you get home you will upload your receipt to receive any rewards on your digital coupons that applied. As for Fetch you will upload your receipt and it will find the rewards points. If you want to spend the time selecting specific deals and then base your shopping trip around those would be the best play to maximize the rewards. As for me, on Saturday mornings before running errands I will look through all of the applications and add items that I will typically buy anyway. The time to do this only takes around 10 mins, and when I get home the uploading of receipts takes around 1 minute per receipt and application.
