Mystery Shopping, Online Offers, & More-Long Post

I received an email today my friend Mandy about Mystery Shopping and thought maybe I should create a post about it. I used to be a mystery shopper about 5 years ago, and my husband has signed up for a few shops now.

You sign up, are offered shops based on where you live, and you have to fill out forms and submit them for reimbursement. They can be for anything from a bank or windows, to a drugstore. My husband was even offered one for a tanning salon! Anyway, I am not an expert nor do I have all of the information compiled for you, but Carrie at Money Saving methods does! Her blog is phenomenal, and she has a ton of step by step information and even tells you the best mystery shopping companies, and gives you all the rules and "methods" for mystery shopping. I will tell you this: Do NOT EVER pay to be on a mystery shopping list!!! You should be able to register for free and then be offered shops. When you go to Carrie's homepage look at the left hand side bar, and she has a tab for Mystery shopping, click on it, and read the instructions thoroughly before signing up for any shops. Mystery shopping money has been one of the contributors to my monthly Snowflakes.

Now, while you are there, you need to check out the section for Online Offers. This could change your life! You know those pop up ads "Answer this question for a $500.00 Target Gift Card..."?

Well, some of them are real!!! I can speak from experience! I was able to get 2 $250 gas cards back in November by following Carrie's instructions. Now, again, read her instructions very carefully! She even has a list of legitimate offers you can choose from! She makes it so easy for you-and me! Carrie even answered an email I sent her asking for her help when I did my first offer. After I did mine, My Shop Without Money Sister did one, and we both received our gift cards. Let me tell you, there is no better feeling then not paying for gas from Thanksgiving until Valentine's Day!!!

Carrie lays out the best way to do this, to put out the least investment, and make the most profit. When I did mine I signed up for "offers" like Columbia House, Disney Movie Club, and different beauty products. For my free movies I picked gifts for my nieces and nephews for Christmas, and also the beauty products. I had half of my shopping done in September! All in all, it cost me about $75.00 to make $500.00.

Please read Carrie's instructions carefully, and feel free to ask questions, I will help the best I can! I have a home improvement project I am planning on doing, so I am going for a $500.00 Home Depot or Visa Card next! I hope this can be useful to you as well! Good Luck!

Make Money with Snap Dollars

This one looks interesting. It offers surveys, games for cash and my personal favorite, online offers! Steph and I both ventured into the world of online offers this past Fall. We learned about them from the master, Carrie at Moneysaving Methods. Online offers are those emails you receive that say things like, "Someone just sent you a $500 Wal-Mart gift card." Then you scroll through and answer a bunch of survey questions only to discover at the end that you have to sign up for some trial offers or a join a book or cd club. Well, we always thought these were a hoax and you had to spend more money than you would receive. We started reading Carrie's blog posts (listed in our sidebar as one of our favorites) about these offers and decided to give it a try. We followed all the rules and instructions and were able to both obtain $500 in Mobile gas cards for spending about $75 each. Plus, the $75 we spent got us some great dvd's, books and other items that we used to stock our goodie closets and complete some of our holiday shopping. Now...yes, there's that catch - you've got to spend money to make money, and you have to do a little work in researching each offer's terms, etc., and you do have to call and cancel any TRIAL offers within the allotted time period....but if I walked up to you on the street tomorrow and said, "Would you like $500 in exchange for $75?" I bet you'd quickly pull out $75 and hand it over! That's a great investment. The online offer we did was quite a big one for a first-timer (but with Carrie's excellent experience and instruction we got through it, survived it and made money). Now we'd like to start sharing this info with you. And please feel free to check out Carrie's info on her blog as well, as we'll probably be referencing her often.
So what I can see from Snap Dollars, it looks a lot like paidinboxdollars but with more opportunities to earning $$ for yourself. If you are interested in following this series, my first advice is sign up with Snap Dollars today. Set up your account, preferably one with an email to your deals account (if you don't yet have one, just set up an alternative email address so you won't get a lot of Spam to your personal email address - you could use yourname'sdealsemails@xxx.com.
Then beginning in the next couple of days, you can begin completing deals along with us, to add money to your snapdollars account. We'll go into detail about how to do this and earn money. For now, sign up, activate your account (you'll earn $5 for doing that) and start reading around the offers a little bit. We'll be breaking it down and simplifying the "Methods" for you in the next few days, as I'm eager to earn a little extra WDW cash and I know some friends who are, too! So hit the banner above, sign up and then leave a comment letting us know you're getting in on the action!