Do you use Ebates.com? If not, why not?? Ebates is essentially a site that pays you to shop. I know, it doesn’t make sense, right? Well, essentially, when you shop online and have clicked a referral link, that referrer gets paid. What Ebates does is pass some of that payment on to you. For every purchase you make through their referral links, you get a percentage of that payment. The percentage varies by store. Then, four times a year, Ebates sends you a Big Fat Check (or makes a PayPal deposit) of the money you have “earned.” The minimum payout is $5, which seems like a lot, but trust me, it doesn’t take long at all to get to that point.
I know, it sounds too good to be true. But I’ve been a member for a few years, and I’ve gotten a significant amount of cash back. When I shop online, I always check to see if the store is listed on Ebates. A lot of stores are listed. Recently, I’ve shopped at drugstore.com, Sephora, and REI and gotten cash back. I bring this up now because the first quarter payments were deposited on May 15, and I received over $33 in cash back! Admittedly, there was a sizeable purchase in there, but it was a planned purchase. Something that I intended to buy and I got money back for doing it. Awesome.
They also have coupon codes on the site, so be sure to check those out as well.
Interested? Join up! I linked my referral link above, but if you are worried I’m just trying to get referrals, you can sign up directly at the site. I’m not here to make money for myself, I just want everyone to know about Ebates! And if you have already signed up but never use the site, get back to it!
Megan is a 40-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.
