Earning Amazon Gift Cards for Christmas ( or whatever else you would like)

My husband and I have three kids and of course Christmas comes round once a year. So this year I tried to earn a few gift cards here and there through a few sites to save some money for the holidays. The great thing about Amazon is that they have toys of course, but also pantry supplies and I've purchased things like coffee and toilet paper from there before. The main site I use is

Swagbucks


The main ways I earn are from the daily poll ( 1 point) and then the searches. You get random amounts for searching through their search engine. They have games and such called Swago ( like Bingo) they do sometimes and if I have time then I'll do that- but it adds up nicely. You can cash out with as little as 300 points which is $3. Besides Amazon they have a ton of other options, and I cashed out $25 to Target around back to school for school supplies.

The next site I use a lot is Bing
www.bing.com
I'm pretty sure I don't get referral bonus points for when my friends sign up- but it's a super easy site so I wanted to share with you all anyways. You can earn up to 150 points a day searching and they have some bonus opportunities for earning through daily polls etc. It's super easy and I cash out 1-2 times a month for a $5 Amazon code.

The next site I use is Ibotta

When you sign up I get a $5 bonus and you get $10! You need $20 to cash out and you get paid for items you purchase at the grocery store ( or other stores) and then you scan the receipt with your phone. They have some offers that are called " any brand" so you may get 25 cents for a loaf of bread- it doesn't matter what brand. A while back they had a great deal on a particular breakfast sandwich my husband likes at Sams. They were on sale for $9.98 ( from $12.98) then for each box you got $5 from ibotta! It doesn't take long to rack up that way.


I hope some of these sites help you. There are several more I use but these are the easiest and faster I've found to earn money.

Please note there may be affiliate links in my post. Thanks!

October Financial update- lets talk numbers

It's been a while since I've posted about our debt free journey. You can read about the mountains of debt we have here and here. 

So you may recall that at the beginning of this year we started really trying to get out of debt and pay off our debt aggressively. I'm not exactly sure what happened with that. The first few months went well! Like really well. But then around April we started to slip. I say we, but really it's mostly me, which is another hard pill to swallow. My husband has a debit card, but really only uses it for gas. He does not spend money for anything for himself really. It's mainly going over on our grocery budget, going out to eat, fun stuff like movies for the kids, clothes that we probably don't have to have etc. So we started to kind of started a slow decline of not paying as much as I had hoped on our debt. So the good news- NO NEW DEBT.

That's a start right?

So actually from January 1st until today we have paid off $6,580 which brings our non mortgage debt to $144798.

While my husband has been " on board" with debt payoff I think he kind of just left it to me and did whatever. I pay the bills, I pay for groceries, I pay for the kids stuff etc. So he just kind of didn't know. But we had a long talk and I told him that I really needed more support in this. I needed him to be a cheerleader and be much more present in our budget, our finances etc. He is more than willing- I think I've just never really expressed to him my desire for his help.

So that's where we are. We haven't gone up, but not as much progress as we have hoped.

I really want all of debt paid off by the time I turn 40. I turned 36 last month, so we have about 47 months to work with. Sigh.

How are you all doing on your financial goals? Are you saving for a rainy day? Trying to pay off debt? Have a saving goal for a vacation a car? I would love to hear how it's going for you all!