Making money without clocking in

I think that I’ve told you before that for this time in my life, I’m a “career mom” meaning that I stay home and commit to serve as a mom and a wife day-in and day-out.  We can talk specifics about how busy that keeps me later, but for today’s post I want to talk to you about some tricks to make money without “clocking-in” to an office of sorts.

One of the very best things I learned, years ago, was the value of using coupons to make purchases.  Over the years my commitment to using these coupons has varied, depending upon the time I had to commit, but the truth still remains that purchasing items with coupons is FAR better than buying them without!  Just to give you a picture of what that means for our home….I have NEVER purchased a tube of toothpaste, since we were married.  NEVER.  With the help of a little, flimsy piece of paper that I cut out of Sunday’s paper, I always get toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss, and several other “regularly purchased items,” completely free.

Yes, I will admit that it takes time to match up coupons with the store deals for the week, but the truth is that if you can carve out just a little bit of time a week, you’ll save yourself hundreds…. sometimes even THOUSANDS of dollars a year.

I’ll work on giving you some quick couponing tips in the weeks to come, but today, let’s start simple, with a tool many of you probably have already heard of: Swagbucks.  Between diapers, wipes, baby food, books, and even toilet paper, our family orders items from Amazon.com on a regular basis!  Swagbucks has allowed us to save TONS of money on our purchases, by providing me with MANY $5.00 Amazon gift cards.  My husband is still a skeptic, so I won’t judge you if you too, don’t experience the value or ease of Swagbucks, but for those of you who are like me, you’ll become almost giddy at the fact that you earn money for free!  Here’s how it works.

Swagbucks is a search engine like Google.  Every time I search anything online, I use it.  Then, you earn Swagbucks occasionally as you search.  (I say occasionally, because I still can’t figure out a rhyme or reason Swagbucks are awarded.)  With those bucks, you can buy things in the Swagstore.  As I mentioned above, my favorite item to buy is a $5.00 Amazon Gift Card, but there’s all kinds of GC’s to earn including Southwest Airlines and even Apple!  It’s getting FREE money for searching!

If you haven’t signed up already, click here to sign up and start earning!  Just think: if you start now, you could have enough gift cards to pay for many (or maybe ALL) of your Christmas gifts!