As winter turns to spring, a number of people are trying to lose a few pounds that they gained over the holiday season or trim their love handles for a special event. While I truly believe everybody is a beach body and no one needs to lose weight, if you’re looking for some added incentives in your weight loss challenge, why not try to lose pounds while gaining cash?
Get Paid for Healthy Actions
One very easy way to make a little bit of extra money while working towards a healthy lifestyle is by using the Achievement app. All you do is link apps you already use (such as a step counter, meditation app, other fitness apps) and you will earn points for those activities. Once you reach 10,000 points, you can cash out for $10.
I will be honest with you, Achievement points do take a while to add up. But at the same time, I don’t have to do anything extra to earn those points, so I’m going to continue to use the app. I’ve already cashed out $30 with them, and that’s $30 just for my healthy activities. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Bet on Yourself
There are a couple of websites where you can bet on your ability to lose weight, compete alongside others, and win money. The two most popular are Diet Bet and Healthy Wage. While the sites differ, the basic premise is that you commit to losing a specific percentage of your weight in a set amount of time, and you bet money on that commitment. That money all goes into a pot, and then everyone who meets their goal gets to split the pot.
I have used Diet Bet, and my first thought was “Okay, what keeps people from cheating?” Diet Bet definitely does its best to get legitimate results from people. You need to submit photos as part of your proof (but these stay private, of course). Naturally, with any of these, when you do your initial weigh-in, you want to do that later in the day, and when you do your final weigh-in, you want to do that first thing in the morning when you are the lightest, but really, that fluctuation isn’t going to be a lot.
I’ve never won a significant amount from Diet Bet – maybe $10 plus my initial bet back. But simply working to not lose the money was great motivation.
You can also bet on yourself using Step Bet. Here, the app takes a look at your step counter, sets your personal step goals for a week, and then you work towards those goals for six weeks. Again, everyone who meets their goals wins a portion of the pot.
The great thing about these programs is that if you want, you can do them all together. It’s a risk, because you’re contributing money, and you might lose. But that risk is a great way to keep yourself on track and hopefully, you’ll come out with some extra cash in the end!
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.
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