SwagBucks - Counting My Pennies

Who likes getting something for nothing?

I’ve seen SwagBucks mentioned around the blogosphere a few times, but I had never checked it out til this week, and I must say, I’m hooked. What is SwagBucks? It’s a search engine, powered by Google and Ask.com, but you can win SwagBucks for searching. Great, you think. What do I do with a SwagBuck? Well, you purchase prizes. 45 SwagBucks gets you a $5 Amazon.com gift certificate, for example. I signed up a week ago and have already racked up enough to order my first gift certificate. I’m always doing websearches, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it out.

If you haven’t already, check it out! Here’s my affiliate link (I get points if you sign up), but I know some people are skeptical about those. However, SwagBucks is something I think you should check out even if you don’t use my link. Go!

Megan Smith

Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.

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