Thankful Tuesday

Today my post is about me being thankful for the little things I have going for me. What I mean is, since I am a stay at home mom we basically live on one income, being my husbands. We don't have as much money as we would like to, and I am sure that applies with all mothers that stay at home.

About a year ago I started looking for ways to bring in a little extra income to help our situation. I do not want to work outside the home because I want to raise my baby myself. So I started looking at paid survey companies and I signed up for a TON of them. All I got was thousands of spam emails per day and no surveys! Well I did not let that discourage me. I kept looking until I finally found a couple of programs that I do make a little money on.

These are certainly not get rich quick schemes by any means. I am happy if I make an extra 50$ a month just sitting at home on my computer doing things I would be doing anyways in my spare time. 50$ is a lot of money to me, that's like paying my phone bill or car insurance or just an extra 50$ in savings. If you are like me, you understand how much any extra money helps.

So as time has progressed I finally found a few places that really do pay off.

One of my favorites is Hits4Pay. This isn't a survey company, you get paid for reading the ads on the site. I always thought these places were a waste of time but I have been successful with this one. They give you a 10$ sign up bonus and pay you .02$ per each ad you read. Right now I have 18.41$ in my account for just for clicking on the ads I get everyday. That's not bad for a couple of minutes a day!

One of my top favorite survey companies is American Consumer Opinion Program. This is a very good company to do survey's from. The thing you need to know about this place is you do not get surveys inside your account. They send you surveys and the sender's name is Anne Parks. Whenever you see these surveys you should definitely do them, they pay great! I just finished a survey about Rimmel Lipstick and earned 5$ in about 10 minutes, which will be credited to my account in less than 2 weeks. I LOVE this company!!

I also do surveys for SurveySavvy. They send surveys to your email too, and some of them are really good! Once you sign up for an account, go fill out the short profile surveys so you will receive more surveys! It takes a little while for them to start coming in but they generally pay very well for short surveys.

I really love Mindfield Online! I love all of the survey companies that send surveys straight to my email because I have a a habit of forgetting to log in and check for them. They have short surveys about your demographics that you should fill out to be included in a broader range of surveys, but even if you don't you will still get them! I just checked my account and I haven't fill out any of the profile surveys except for the general one and I receive quite a few surveys to my email, and most of them are 5$ surveys! I think the lowest one I ever saw was 3$ and I have seen them go up to 10$. Sometimes you won't qualify for certain surveys but that usually doesn't happen to me.

InboxDollars and SendEarnings are basically the same company. When you log in to you account everything lookls exactly the same, but they are different companies! You can make money from both of them seperatly. They send you paid emails which you earn a couple of cents clicking on them, and they also have paid surveys! You get .50$ per survey and they are usually pretty short. You also get a 5$ sign up bonus. You can usually take a few surveys a day so if you did 2 a day for 1.00$ per day, on each site, that would be 60$ a month! I like this place too, and clicking the emails do add up!

CreationRewards is a really neat place. You earn points and the points can be cashed in to buy all kinds of stuff including gift certificates to places like Amazon, Target, Starbucks, Walmart, or you can even receive a paper check from them! It is very easy to accumulate earnings here because there are 2 surveys you can do every single day and if you do both of them you earn 220 points. You can earn a 5$ Amazon giftcard with 1000 points so if you did both surveys everyday, you could have enough points for a 5$ giftcard in 5 days! You can see that it is easy to accumulate points here. You can also earn points by visiting certain websites and paid emails, but the surveys are the fastest way to get your points.

The is a cool new concept a few places are coming out with now, search the internet on their site and earn points! Redeem your points for all kinds of cool stuff! The one I like the best is SwagBucks. You do your regular internet surfing and if you are anything like me, you do about 20 google searches a day, LOL. Anyways, do your searches and you get rewarded SwagBucks! You can also get randomly rewarded too. Earn enough SwagBucks and redeem them for just about anything! 115 SwagBucks gets you a 10$ Barnes and Noble giftcard. I am sure going to love this place, I have only been using it for like half a day and already have 10 SwagBucks, woohoo!






Lastly, there is this cool new place called Scour which is like a type of search engine. This is almost just like the one above. You can search by going to the site and doing any kind of search that you would do on Google or Yahoo or any of those places or you can download their toolbar. You get points each time you search and you will randomly get bonus points! I just started trying this and it seems really cool. I will post an update once I use it more and see what all it has to offer.

Those are all the places I have had success with thus far. I have a few more I am trying out to see if they amount to anything before I let my readers know about them. The best thing about these places is they are tried and true and you don't have to go through all the trouble like I did trying to find the ones that actually do pay off! Check them out =)

This post doubles as my Works for Me Wednesday post. If you would like to see more WFMW posts go here.

Fix Scratched CDs - Works for Me Wednesday

I just figured out some really awesome this morning and I am going to use it for my Works for Me Wednesday post! My son has a PS2 and when he was a baby he got into our games and scratched them up so bad they won't play anymore. Well, he really wanted to play a certain game last night and it just would not play so he went to bed sad and so did I. This morning I really wanted to fix it for him before he woke up this morning so I started thinking about my huge stockpile of toothpaste and figured it was worth a try!

I grabbed a tube of free toothpaste and slathered it on the cd and buffed it clean, popped it in the PS2 and to my suprise it works perfectly! I am so happy I can't wait till the little boy wakes up and sees he game working!

So if you have any CD games or possibly DVDs (haven't tried it on DVDs) that won't play, try buffing them with toothpaste and see if that helps!

I used white toothpaste that did not have any gritty stuff in it.

This works for me, check here for other Works for Me Wednesday tips!

Self Cleaning Oven - Works for Me Wednesday

Today's Works for Me Wednesday blog post is about cleaning your oven with the self clean feature. I know not everybody has an oven with a self clean feature but if you do, consider yourself lucky! I have had my new oven for almost 7 months and never even knew what a self clean oven was. Well, I got tired of looking at the yucky mess inside from my husband overfilling pans so I decided to do something about it.

Here is a before picture:

So after looking up self cleaning ovens on the internet and figuring out exactly how it works, I decided to give it a try. And I must say I was actually scared to do this, something about having your oven lock itself and heat up to 900 degrees for 3 hours was not very appealing to me. I did it though, and it was totally worth it. It nuked everything that was inside and all I had to do was wipe everything down with a wet cloth and now it looks brand new again!

Here is an after picture:


I am happy my oven is clean and I am going to keep it clean the old fashion way now, because I am sure using the self clean feature is not very frugal when it comes to the electricity bill.

So self cleaning ovens work for me, wanna see more Works for Me Wednesday tips? Visit here.

Works for Me Wednesday

I am going to start trying to post a "Works for Me Wednesday" post every Wednesday with something I do around the house or elsewhere that works for me! I am excited about this because I recently found a love for trying new things, especially money saving frugal things! I used to be a person that didn't care about money spent, spent plenty of it, was very wasteful, and very disorganized! Also not to make myself look worse or anything.... lol.... I was an awful housekeeper! I never cleaned house because I was too busy with my stay at home job, I also never cooked, did laundry, or anything besides "work".

I am glad those days are over and I must say, if they had an "Extreme Life Choices Makeover" show I would definitely be the #1 star! I am proud to say that in just a short 2 months or so, I transformed into a regular little Susy Homemaker! It just makes one feel so much better to be eco-friendly, cook good meals for so cheap, and have a spotless house all the time! Yes I have given up my stay at home job for the most part, I still do a few hours a week and still bring a decent little income, but for the most part I am have become more involved with being a good mother versus being a good worker. I wish I could balance the 2 of them better but I am finding it hard right now. I am constantly tired and once I finish the housework and cooking I find it hard to get motivated to do any real work. Plus my son is out for the summer and it's hard to do anything with him around, work wise. Once he goes back to school and my new baby is born I am planning on returning to my job and putting at least 20-30 hours a week back in and bumping that income back up.

Anyways, enough rambling already! Here is my Works for Me Wednesday!

Hang drying laundry!! Today I am trying this for the first time ever. I have been fortunate enough to have a washer and dryer for the past 4 or so years and it is just so easy to throw wet clothes into the dryer and turn it on. I am not sure how much electricity this is actually going to save, or how much money off my light bill but I sure hope it's more than noticeable. I am one of those people that throw the laundry into the dryer, turn it on on the hottest setting then forget about the clothes and when I get around to hanging them I turn the dryer back on to get the wrinkles out. So I go off to do something else and forget about the laundry again for another 3 hours, then I turn the dryer on again to get the wrinkles out.... again.... and usually wind up forgetting them again.

Needless to say, I read somewhere that the electric dryer can be one of the most energy consuming appliances in a home next to the hot water heater and refrigerator. My light bill has been dropping the past couple of months since summer is in full swing here in Texas and the AC cost considerable less to run than electric heaters. Last month my bill was 135$. I haven't gotten my bill yet this month but I am hoping for at least a 10$ drop from that. I am going to note when my cycle runs and note that today I started line drying my clothes, and when I get the next months bill I am going to compare and see how much I really saved.

I know nothing about this so I am hoping to drop at least 20-30$ off my light bill but my estimate could be totally off, like I said I don't have any idea how much it will save. If my light bill only goes down like 5$ a month, I will probably wind up just drying my laundry in the dryer again because it is very time consuming to line dry, plus I have to constantly guard my clothes from my dogs who are at this very moment jumping in the air trying to grab my husbands jeans to play tug of war with. As much as I hate to say it, if this doesn't save a good chunk of money I will regretfully be going back to the old ways. Hopefully this will work for me.