Isabella Stewart Gardner museum has several ways to visit for free or for very little

Add this museum to the list of Boston museums that are accepting EBT cards for discounted admission; they will let in up to four people per card for $2 each. They also offer free admission on your birthday, and free admission at any time if your name is Isabella.

Museum of Fine Arts doesn't actually want people using their discounted admissions for EBT card holders

I previously wrote about how cool the MFA's discount program is. Last week I was told that they don't accept debit/credit payment for the reduced admission. Their website doesn't say anything about this, but the person at the counter and the manager were both adamant about this, stating "we aren't set up to process transactions at that price point." This seems to violate the Dodd-Frank act, since businesses can require a minimum purchase of up to $10 for credit cards, but cannot do so for debit cards (four $3 EBT admissions to the MFA is $12). They do have an ATM in the building, but seemed unsympathetic to the fact that this would result in the ATM and my bank charging me fees that are as much as the ticket.

Here are the links for reporting them to MasterCard and to Visa for violation of merchant policies.

Did you know Masshealth covers over-the-counter drugs?

I recently learned that Masshealth covers a number of OTC drugs if you get a prescription for them. My primary care provider actually knew this when I brought it up, but hadn't ever informed me of it. My PCP was happy to write me prescriptions for iron, antacids, Aleve, and so forth. I did have a copay of $3.65 per prescription, so some of these products might be available cheaper through coupon stacking. If you're buying these things full-price though, most of them are quite a bit more than $3.65 for a month's supply. For children under 21, there is no copay, so definitely ask for prescriptions for any cold medications, Tylenol, etc. that your kids use.

The list of what they cover is here. I was pretty amazed at first to see that they cover a lot of medicine-cabinet items like rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and hydrocortizone ointment, but then remembered the copay; these items are available at Dollar Tree, and even at CVS or Wegman's are less than $3.65. Still, it seems like a great public health policy to make them available and convenient, and I imagine it cuts down on things that just should not be happening in a wealthy country, like people developing massive infections because they couldn't afford first-aid supplies. The Masshealth guidelines do state that pharmacies and hospitals have to let members have their treatment even if they owe copays, so hopefully this policy combined with the OTC coverage is getting people what they need.

Groupon now offering pyramid scheme where you can get free stuff

I hadn't looked at Groupon in a while (like, years) because the deals used to mostly be for yuppieish entertainment and recreation tickets, which while they were good deals, weren't really the sort of thing we were looking for or had extra money for. It seemed also that all the ones I saw back in the day were set up so that people would see the deal, recruit friends, make plans to go to the paint bar or Harbor cruise or whatever, then if not enough people would buy the Groupon for it to happen, my friends who were into Groupons would still end up patronizing the business at full price since they'd gotten excited about their plans. Brilliant business model, but yeah.

So, today I was pleasantly surprised when a friend posted a link to some steeply discounted holiday photo cards and saw that the deal was one in which they were already steeply discounted, then could result in even more of a discount if the purchaser recruited more purchasers through his/her link. I clicked through and saw that they've also greatly expanded their offerings and have a lot of discounts on things like more ordinary household purchases (BJs memberships, printing services at Staples, pet supplies, clothing, tires) and inexpensive local recreation (soccer field rentals, dance classes for kids, roller skating). There's a new "basics" section that has decent deals on things like diapers and shampoo. The prices aren't as good as what you could get combining coupons and sales, but it's a lot less effort.

Anyway, to the point, they now have a thing where if you sign up using someone's referral link and then make a purchase of at least $10 in the next 72 hours, they get $10 to use on Groupon. So, check out Groupon, if you see something you like, use my link to make your account, then tell all your friends about it so you can get free stuff too.

Free cereal, oatmeal, bottled water, ranch dip at Stop and Shop this week

This week, you can get Malt-O-Meal cereal, Essentia water, Hidden Valley Ranch dip mix, Quaker Real Medleys oatmeal all for free using printable online coupons. There are a couple more free items too if you use coupons from the Sunday paper. Remember, Stop and Shop's sales change on Fridays, so this is good today through next Thursday.

Museum of Fine Arts now offering discounted admission

The MFA has finally joined the Museum of Science and the Children's Museum in offering free or heavily discounted admission to EBT card holders. I'm not sure when they started doing this, or why it wasn't announced (I seem to recall writing to them maybe a year ago and asking why they didn't do it, and getting an e-mail back explaining that they don't have a lot of extra funds), but it's here now. On the "visit" page, buried toward the bottom, it says that if you show your EBT card at the admissions desk, you can get four $3 tickets. Youth 17 and under are always free. It's a nice respectful space for people with disabilities, particularly on weekdays. Something about the quiet and still art museum atmosphere means that staff and other visitors don't tend to do the whole running up and making patronizing comments, which is a plus

UPDATE: You'll have to bring cash if you want to buy discounted tickets.

Grrrrrr...

I took one week off and didn't check the coupon deals (sick kids, low on cash, friend in town, etc.) and I missed an incredible deal. Right now on the various coupon boards, the Starbucks $4 off two products ($4.99 or more) coupon is all the rage. It isn't a coupon that would make sense for me to use on a full-price item, because even though $2 off a $6 pack of Frappuccino is a good deal, I'm not spending a dollar per bottle on a junk food item that I can make for a few cents at home. It isn't worth it for the bagged beans either unless they're way on sale, because while it's amazing coffee, but it would still be at least $7.99 a pound -- imma stick with Cafe Bustelo. BUT, apparently last week Stop and Shop had four-packs of iced coffee on sale for $1.99 each. I have four of these coupons. I could have gotten eight four-packs of Starbucks iced coffee for free. FOR FREE, PEOPLE. Thirty-two mo effin' bottles of iced coffee. I really enjoy deals on these sorts of brand-name products because I can store them and use them if I need a quick thank-you gift or don't want to show up at someone's house empty handed. I may be broke, but I'm just not going to take my free jars of pasta sauce or packets of noodles to the office holiday swap, ya know? Ah well, I'm on the lookout for more Starbucks coupon deals before these bad boys expire.

Bread is ridiculously expensive. Making it is easier than I thought.

I've been experimenting with Artisan Bread in Five Minutes lately. I've been using the basic recipe from food.com, but I really should buy the book at this point, because I looked through it at a book store and it has other recipes and a lot of great advice. It's been out since 2007, so there are used copies on Amazon for a couple bucks. There's also a new a new version out that has even more recipes, though it's expensive and there aren't very cheap used versions out yet.

I haven't calculated the cost of making bread, though I seem to remember the book getting into that. Just roughly estimating it, the recipe requires 6.5 cups of flour (about 1.5 pounds) and two packets of yeast. Oh, and 1.5 tablespoons of salt. That's like $1.50 worth of ingredients without getting them on sale and/or couponing, and it makes four one-pound loaves. So, about 50 cents for a loaf of nice bread, which can be three or four dollars at a bakery or supermarket. The thing with this method is that you make a giant batch of dough that you can keep in the fridge and use for a week or two, so you can also pull out a chunk and make pizza on it.

The Purina coupon came!

The free cat food coupon showed up from the Purina thing I posted about. I requested it on July 1, and it showed up on August 30, so it took nearly two months, but it's legit, it showed up, and I went and bought a giant bag of food with it. One word of caution: it shows up in an envelope that looks like junk mail, so check your mail carefully. But definitely go sign up (do me a favor and use my link in the previous post, please?) and you should be able to get a free giant bag of cat food every month to two months once you're started and earning the points regularly.

Complaining about stuff, for fun and profit

I've snagged some really sweet free stuff recently by complaining about crappy service or ridiculous policies. My initial intention wasn't to be compensated; in a few instances I had a time-sensitive issue with a service I was paying for and needed it fixed, and in a few others, I had constructive feedback that I wanted to pass along, and also felt that I hadn't gotten my money's worth. Nevertheless, I've gotten some pretty large gift cards and coupons from making complaints to businesses, so I highly recommend trying this. The few minutes it takes to send an e-mail or make a phone call are definitely worth it for the usually substantial reward you'll get.

My rules when complaining:

1) Unless something extremely egregious happened, stick to major corporations. Don't make complaints to family-owned businesses or small local businesses for minor issues. If you're going to come away feeling like you took advantage of someone or wondering if they'll be able to pay their bills, don't do it. (If you're someone who is going to feel guilty screwing over a multimillion-dollar corporation, I'm not sure why you're reading my blog.)

2) Make your complaints constructive. Explain to them how they might better handle it next time. Let them know that you totally understand how such a mistake could be made.

3) Try as hard as you can to make sure the complaint won't reflect poorly on a minimum-wage (or close to it) worker. If the specific person helping you likely fits into this category, make sure you make it clear that s/he was helpful and tried his/her best, but that a higher-up policy was the source of the issue. If the person was outright rude, do mention this, but try and frame it as an issue with training. Let them know that you've had your share of minimum wage jobs, and you know it can be frustrating to not be properly trained to handle things, and you sympathize with the worker, while at the same time, are asserting how you were screwed over.

4) If they aren't offering, ask. Let them know how much you appreciate their time and concern, but reiterate that you live on a limited income, and you paid for a service and feel you didn't receive it. Ask if there's anything they can do to win you back as a customer and make you feel like it was money well spent.

5) Don't make something up that didn't happen. Just don't. Don't pretend something was left out of your order, don't pretend someone was rude who was just bored. Don't treat the hired help like the hired help. This is between you and your deity of choice, or conscience or whatever you prefer, but just, for the love of whoever, just don't!

Children's Museum offers $2 admission for EBT card holders

I'm not a huge fan of the Children's Museum, just because the educational component is quite minimal compared to the Museum of Science or Museum of Fine Arts. Most of it has very little information to read and the hands-on experimental materials are mostly fairly common household items. It's definitely geared toward the infant/toddler set as far as learning anything new, but is still quite fun for kids and adults. At $2 per person though, I don't mind taking the family to a space that's essentially a playground. I will say that we have found museum to be super special-needs friendly and haven't experienced any issues around staff being patronizing or providing unwanted "help," which I can't say for many places. Just present your EBT card and a photo ID at the admissions desk and they admit you with no hassle.

Boston free grocery roundup

I love coupons. Before I read websites explaining how to use them, it didn't seem really worth it to use coupons to get 50 cents off of something. Since becoming mostly unemployed, I've read sites like Living Rich with Coupons and have learned how to wait until something is on sale and there's a coupon, which can get you stuff for a few cents or even free. With our newspaper, a couple neighbors' coupon inserts, and online coupons, we can usually buy several of things and stock up when they're cheap. We currently have a huge bin full of deodorant, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, and toothpaste in our bathroom, all of which were 50 cents or less a piece and many of which were free. These things never go bad, we don't really care about brands, so we just buy them whenever there's a coupon deal. We also have bins in our kitchen of condiments and a lot of canned and boxed goods that we got similarly cheap. Between coupons for dry goods and the Fair Foods truck for produce each week, we're spending barely anything on groceries.

Since there are already coupon matchup sites like the one I mentioned, I'm not going to post coupon matchups here. However, I will post free or near-free deals of things available in Boston-area grocery stores using online printable coupons.

Ortega Salsa, $2.99 for two of them at Stop and Shop, use printable coupon and it's $1.99 for two. Should be able to print two coupons per computer.

Pirates Booty mac and cheese, $1.50 at Stop and Shop, use printable coupon, which they'll double, and it will be free.

Westsoy 32 oz soy milk, $1.00 at Dollar Tree, use printable coupon and it will be free. I've only found it at the Somerville Dollar Tree.

Trying this Purina free cat food thing

A couple months ago, I signed up for this Purina Myperks site using a code a friend sent me. Every day I've gone in and clicked on things, had a couple of friends accept my invite, and I've entered two UPC codes from cat food I've bought. Wow, there really ARE internet pyramid schemes for everything! It took me about a month to get to 30,000 points, which is a coupon for up to $15.99 off of a bag of cat food. Pretty cool. I requested the coupon on July 1, and they mail it, and I haven't seen it yet. I'll update when it shows up. Still, the program seems pretty easy and I can't imagine it wouldn't be legit. If I can get a free $15.99 bag per month, that would cover about half of my cat food expenses, which would be awesome. Here's my link if anyone wants to try it.

Fair foods: huge bag of produce for $2, no income or ID requirement

I can't even tell you how much I am loving the Fair Foods truck. They come to my neighborhood every week and offer whatever surplus produce they have for $2 per bag. The bags are actually around 15-20 pounds most weeks. One week they had cases of blemished tomatoes for $2 as well. Last week we got summer squash, onions, garlic, lemons, and tomatoes. This is some of the leftovers of the haul:

For a quick dinner, I tossed onions and squash on a baking sheet and sprinkled it with oil, soy sauce, lemon juice from a couple of the lemons, and fajita spices. 

I roasted it in the oven until it looked amazing, then served with rice and sour cream on WIC tortillas. Amazing, fresh, healthy dinner (plus lunch the next day and still plenty of raw veggies left) for $2 plus a few cents' worth of items from my pantry. 

A great reminder

Bing Rewards seems better than Swagbucks so far

I’ve been playing around with Bing Rewards, which so far seems a bit better than Swagbucks. They’re similar type things, except that Bing will let you have up to 40 credits (roughly the same worth as 40 Swagbucks) per day from searching, and it makes it clear how many searches you need to do on your particular level to get credits from searching. Swagbucks, on the other hand, gives out credits for search randomly, and mostly relies on codes and scammy offers to earn bucks. Bing Rewards is much simpler and just has credits for search and a couple of articles to click on each day and earn 1 credit each.

Bing Rewards certainly seems to send the rewards faster; it’s generally taken less than a day to get an Amazon gift card. This is definitely a plus. It also has the option of trading in the same amount of credits for either a $5 Amazon gift card or 500 Swagbucks. As we lovers of free stuff know, 500 Swagbucks is more than a $5 Amazon gift card, but I’m not sure it’s worth it to wait the week or so to get the card through Swagbucks.

I do plan to keep my Swagbucks account around, because I enjoy earning credits for things like purchases I was already planning on making, redeeming coupons from coupons.com, and so forth. But I’m thinking I’ll switch to Bing Rewards for my default search engine. Er, unless I want to actually find anything, in which case I’ll keep using google. So, yeah, if you want to try Bing Rewards, go sign up using my referrer link and we can each buy our families some supplies.

Internet Essentials $9.99 per month cable internet is available in Boston

My family and I signed up for Internet Essentials a few months ago, and so far we are quite happy with it.

The signup process was a bit ridiculous; I had to call and speak to someone for a screening to determine I was eligible, then they said they would mail me a contract to send back. First they sent me a Comcast bill for $0.00 and a bunch of pages of fine print, which I thought was the contract but wasn’t sure how to fill it out or send it back. I called and talked to someone and they said that wasn’t the contract, and the contract takes 7-10 business days to arrive, which 1) is kind of ridiculous 2) had already elapsed. They said they could resend it by mail or e-mail, and that e-mail would take 3-5 business days (WTF?), and that doing either would invalidate the first one because it would be a new copy with new numbers on it. Wow, and they’re not even a government agency. So I waited a couple more days for the mailed contract to arrive, which it did. I had the option of mailing or faxing it back, and fortunately, I’m one of the approximately six individuals in the United States who faxes things. After faxing it back, I had to wait 3-5 business days and then call them. To see if they got the fax. Right. I did, they did, and they UPSed me the Comcast setup kit with the modem and everything in a couple of days.

I discovered I didn’t have cable coming into my unit, so I called and arranged to have it installed. The installation scheduling was done through the general Comcast office rather than part of Internet Essentials specifically, so the customer service was standard-issue crappy customer service instead of holy-ridiculous-poor-people customer service, and they sent someone out the next morning. They quoted me $50 for the install, which was fine with me since I would be saving immensely on internet. They ended up refunding the $50 charge, noting it was “charged in error,” which I assume means Internet Essentials customers aren’t meant to pay it. Once it was installed, I set it up with no problem using the pamphlet that shipped with the modem.

The service is slower than many of the Comcast packages (5 Mbps), but it’s certainly sufficient for our purposes and is fast enough for watching Hulu, streaming Pandora, downloading things, and so forth without any issues. Eligibility requires proof that your child is enrolled in school or is homeschooled and is eligible for free lunch. I don’t know how they determine this if the local school provides universal free lunch as ours does. They did say that proof of Food Stamps eligibility works for homeschool or private school students. They also have computers available for $149.99, though they don’t say what kind and I couldn’t readily find anything doing a cursory google search. Naturally, they’ve done some serious SEO, so everything that comes up is press releases and official information, not, say, bloggers saying what kind of computer they got.

Eastern Bank likes to give me free money

I have a personal checking account with Eastern Bank that I haven’t used in years. It has no fees, unless I let it go more than six months with no activity, which I’ve taken care of by setting up an automatic transfer of a dollar into it every month from the online checking account I use regularly.

About once or twice a year, Eastern Bank e-mails me a promotion that says they’ll give me $20 if I pay two bills using their bill payment service. So I transfer some money into that account and pay whichever two bills are due next, and a month later or so they give me free money. Pretty sweet deal for doing nothing.

Who the hell faxes anything anymore?

I used to ask myself this, and still do from time to time, but the reality is that most of the medical and social services world still thinks it’s 1991 and uses faxes for everything. Many of these places are even using paper fax machines hooked up to phone lines. The reason for much of this is that HIPAA, FERPA, and all those other privacy-related acronyms pretty much say nothing about privacy precautions for faxing (or, say, sending medical records via first-class mail with no signature or tracking!) but require extensive precautions to transmit data via e-mail or cloud storage the way most of us do. Most places don’t have the IT capacity or the funds to revamp their entire system to use encrypted e-mail or cloud systems, so they’re stuck using fax and postal mail.

While I don’t work in community service or a medical setting, I now have to deal with these places several times per week between being a foster parent, having a child with multiple disabilities, and participating in a number of community programs to get services for this child and to make ends meet for my family. This means that at least once a week, I need to fax something because the place doesn’t accept it via e-mail. (Or I could take it there personally, or mail it and hope it gets to the right person, but that ends up being more trouble than it’s worth.)

This means I am now the (proud?) owner of a fax number. Fortunately, I don’t have some yellowing plastic paper-jam-ridden machine attached to my nonexistent landline. I’ve been using sFax, and the $9 a month is totally worth it. It’s actually $7.20 per month with one of these 20% off codes that they keep sending me, and sometimes less if you pass the codes along to friends. Yes, you heard me, I actually found a fax-number pyramid scheme; the internet really does have a sketchy multi-level-marketing deal for everything!

The service however is not at all sketchy, and actually is quite impressive. They have a free iPhone app that lets you fax things from your iPhone (it even works on my ancient crank-operated 1929-model iPhone). It’s been incredibly time-saving to just snap a cameraphone picture of whatever I need to send somewhere and fax it off. No one so far has noticed or cared that I’m sending phone pictures of documents; I mean, really, you’ve seen some of the crooked, mangled faxes that doctor’s offices send, right? That’s the other weird thing about faxes; for whatever reason the medical and social services culture considers a faxed document to be an “original.” Hey, works for me.

National Grid offers discounted gas rate for low-income customers

The hardest part of applying for the discount rate for National Grid was finding the stupid form, but it was easy once I did that. They require proof of participation in an income-based program and the form must be mailed.

NStar provides a discounted rate for low-income customers

NStar provides a pretty substantial discount to customers who participate in a number of programs. The form is straightforward but needs to be mailed or faxed with copies of documents verifying eligibility for an income-based program. Our discount showed up on our bill within about a month and part of it was retroactive. Now our electric bill is about $22 per month instead of $35 per month (1000-square-foot home, gas heat, no A/C, no televisions, all light bulbs are energy efficient).

Free Museum of Science admission for EBT and WIC cardholders

The Museum of Science is quickly becoming one of our family’s favorite places to visit, now that they are offering free admission for WIC or EBT card holders. They allow up to four people per card, so if your family has both cards, that’s — wait for it — eight people who can get in for free. We’ve been using this as a way to entertain out-of-town guests.

If you aren’t receiving SNAP (food stamps), check out my post on why it’s worth it to apply even if you feel like you’re doing fine putting food on the table or don’t think you’d qualify for very much per month.

Swagbucks: website that gives you free Amazon gift cards

Swagbucks is a pretty cool way to get some extra spending money. I’ve been using the Amazon gift cards to get mostly kid things; they have some really good deals on usually-expensive things like Kamik boots.

So, Swagbucks is basically a pyramid scheme, to be honest. It’s not the illegal kind though, because you can still earn without having referred anyone. The easiest way to get Swagbucks though is to have other people sign up through your page. I’ve seen people on various work-from-home forums mention that they got hundreds of dollars of referrals by printing up free business cards (using one of the free trial offers that earns you Swagbucks!) with their referral link and leaving them in the laundromat and other places where people are looking for, ahem, get-rich-quick schemes. I haven’t gone that far, but have done nicely by giving some referral links to friends. So, hey, if you don’t have Swagbucks yet, sign up using my account and help my family buy school clothes while earning some gift cards to get some for your own family.

Once you get to the site, you can earn Swagbucks by using their search engine, buying things through their referral links, signing up for things, and various other ways. There’s a coupon engine that uses coupons.com  but earns you Swagbucks for every coupon you redeem, which is pretty cool. Like any sort of reward-for-buying-stuff program, you can earn if you use it only to buy things you can afford and were going to buy already, but can easily get sucked in if you aren’t careful. One Swagbuck is equal to 1.11 cents (450 Swagbucks = $5 on Amazon), so if you buy something that costs $10 in order to get 100 Swagbucks, you’re an idiot. If you had planned to buy the thing anyway though, you might as well get some free money in the process.

Oh, and it goes without saying that if you’re signing up for car insurance quotes and whatnot through Swagbucks or any of these sites, for god’s sake, use one web browser for all of this slightly sketchy web browsing and another one for your normal browsing, like logging into your bank’s web site. And of course get a throwaway e-mail address for all the spam you’re going to be receiving. Swagbucks is pretty reputable and I’ve not known anyone to have anything happen to them other than receiving a lot of spam when they sign up for offers, but still, I’d be cautious and have anything this gimmicky be in a separate browser where it can’t possibly track my important personal info.

Subsidized Hubway membership: easy to get, easy to use

I signed up for a subsidized Hubway membership last week. It was surprisingly hassle-free; I just called the number, spoke to a very helpful associate, and was e-mailed a code to enter into the Hubway site that changed the yearly fee from $85 to $5. A free helmet arrived in the mail a few days later. The person on the phone didn’t need me to send in any verification that we receive low-income benefits, which was surprising. Also interesting to note: the subsidized memberships are free for up to an hour, whereas the full-price membership starts charging you after a 30-minute trip.

Using the bikes is pretty fun. There are stations at a number of the subway stops and at major intersections that aren’t served by the trains. It’s cheaper and more fun than taking the train if you’re just going a few stops, and it’s certainly faster than waiting for buses or walking to get to areas that aren’t near a train line.

The only downside is that there’s no way to take kids along with you. The bike is basically a standard cruiser setup, so I suppose one could attach a trailer or child seat if it’s the type that attaches only to the seatpost. A trailer/trail-behind might be easier because it could be locked to a bike rack once you get to your destination, whereas a child seat would have to be carried around. I couldn’t find anything saying attaching things to the Hubway bikes is prohibited, but I think I’ll wait and see if any of the car-free or cycling bloggers try it and report back before I give it a try. It would be really cool if Hubway eventually rolled out some bikes with child seats or trailers so users could carry small passengers. Tandems would be cool too for older kids or for adult reluctant cyclists, and would be a way to relax the rule that all riders must be at least 16.

Class action suits for fun and profit

You know those ads on daytime television looking for people who’ve been harmed by some drug or product? Because Americans just really like to sue each other? Sure, I appreciate living in a free country and having a less-corrupt-than-many-other-countries justice system available for times when someone is truly harmed by the actions of another.

Apparently though, we also have a justice system and a culture in which someone will sue Kellogg claiming they were duped by Mini-Wheats advertising and led to believe these little hay bales would make their children smarter. And the person suing Kellogg can actually win such a suit, or at least convince Kellogg to settle.

What does this mean for us little people, other than being funny and slightly disturbing? Well, the sue-happy person suffering from post-mini-wheat trauma disorder decided to pursue this as a class action suit instead of just a standard lawsuit. This means that anyone who opts into the class of people who were misled and traumatized by Kellogg’s Mini Wheats can receive a check in the mail for $5-$45 depending how many boxes s/he purchased and how many people opt in to the settlement.

This site and this one both contain dozens of these class action lawsuits. Obviously for the suits that will pay thousands of dollars to people whose Porsche was defective, the claimant has to provide proof of purchase. But for the ones that pay between $1 and $50 to people who purchased Naked juice or L’Oréal hair products, the claimant just has to swear to having actually made a purchase under penalty of perjury.

I’m planning on going on the site every month or so and finding products I’ve purchased. Honestly, I don’t have any problem with getting some cereal refunds from a company that makes millions of dollars per year.

Food stamps can get you more than just food

If you aren’t receiving food stamps, check out the massresources.org eligibility screener. Depending on housing costs and a few other variables, your family income can be up to about $35,000 a year for a family of three and you’ll qualify for a few dollars in food stamps. It’s worth applying if you think you’ll be eligible for anything whatsoever though, because once you have food stamps, you’re considered to be “receiving public assistance” and can get a number of other helpful benefits and services.