$50 Movie Gift Card from Survey Village

I am off to the movies on the back of survey work at Survey Village.

Free Bus Fares and an Excuse to Buy That iPAD or Smartphone???

If you are looking for an excuse to but that iphone, ipad or smartphone, or you need a justification for one that you got for christmas, here is a little piece that might help you....

Bus Fares in Brisbane recently rose by 15%. This has taken the price of my daily commute from $8.28 to $9.54. Now this doesn’t seem like a lot at first glance, but $47.70 a week is one of the larger expenses in my personal budget.

Now on this bus trip each morning and afternoon I spend about 50 or so minutes. What to do? Catch up on some sleep? Maybe read a book?, the paper?, laugh manicly everything 2.5 minutes? or maybe just stare blankly into the bus void avoiding eye contact with all the other humans...or do like most people seem to be doing and engage lovingly with my smart phone…

If you have a smart phone (I have a HTC desire...I think its smart?) how about putting this dead time to use and offsetting the cost of the transport? How about doing online paid surveys and paid messages while you are on the bus, you can easily earn back the cost of your bus fare.

Take a little bit of time to set up a daily / weekly routine and bookmark the web sites.

I check out these survey and reward panels daily or every second day:

RewardsCentral – you can earn points each day and bank amounts over 100 points to earn interest until you are ready to withdraw to get real dollars. You can also get reward point each day by clicking on stuff and playing their lucky number game. (just two clicks)

Pureprofile – you can earn money here with online surveys and by viewing adverts. I try to do one short survey and view a few ads. Most days you can easily earn enough to cover the cost of your bus trip.

GlobalTestmarket - I get a pretty good number of surveys to do here, you can easily get at least one done on a bus trip each day.

These about once per week:

MyOpinons – I regularly have surveys to complete here, but also you can transfer points earned to your Rewards Central account and deposit them in their bank and earn interest until you are ready to withdraw. You can also play an ‘instant win’ game weekly to earn extra points.

Valued Opinions – has regular surveys to do, but only pays out in gift vouchers.

Of course the extra money isn't huge, but it is tax free, and a slightly more productive way to use that time you spend on public transport.

(Note: Some of these survey panels now also have 'apps' for mobile phones, after you sign up for the survey panel you can download them from your phones 'market' for google people or whatever you iphone people call your 'app' store. I have downloaded some and they are frankly pretty crappy....maybe they will improve, but for now I just go to the page on the phones web browser.)

Paid Survey & Mystery Shopping Update

Well 2012 is already well underway, January was just a blur...

It has been a nice time for receiving rewards from paid surveys:

$20 from My Opinions
$36 from Pureprofile
$30 from Rewards Central
and a $20 Gift Voucher from Survey Village

I have also posted a review of Mystery Customer and recommend you join them if you are interested in making some money by doing Mystery Shopping.

As always I am interested in your experiences with doing paid surveys, attending focus groups, doing mystery shopping assignments or any other ways you have found to make a little extra money. Please feeel free to share your good, bad or plain horrific story via the comments box.