Looks like Swagbucks has changed its coupon approach

So Swagbucks no longer does paper grocery coupons, which is unfortunate. I hadn't been using a whole lot of these lately (and neither has anyone else, which is why they seem to be dying out...), but it was a pretty good deal to use Swagbucks every few weeks to print out coupons, get some Swagbucks for printing them, then get some Swagbucks when you redeem them.

However, at the moment they do have a ton of those "magic receipt" things that are actually worth money. Yes, there are a whole bunch that give you five Swagbucks, so, not really worth it unless you happen to see something you know you've bought recently. But there are also a lot worth 500-3000 Swagbucks. Many of these are the same products that are currently on iBotta and have store coupons. I haven't really scoured the details closely, but it looks like there are several products that could end up being free with the iBotta refund and Swagbucks deal.

(As always, if you don't have Swagbucks yet, please check out my tutorials by clicking on the post label, and please use my referral thingy to sign up so we can both get free stuff.)

Club Vegas Slots on Swagbucks: $60-70 without having to buy anything

I downloaded the game at around 10am on Friday June 24, got to Level 90 in the evening of Friday July 8, and it showed as pending within a minute or so after leveling up. The fine print on Swagbucks says "must reach Level 100 within 10 days," but people on Reddit were saying it would pend late, and actually only requires Level 90.

I did it on an iPhone by the "e-mail the link to yourself" option, and allowed the app to track me. I'm going to leave the tracking on until the offer credits.

The game isn't entirely passive and does require you to look over and click every so often, but it's super mindless and definitely something you can do while on a Zoom call, supervising kids, etc.

Tips: 

1) Join the club with the best stats right away. Depending how your club does, you may want to quit your club and try to join another once you hit level 25 or 50. You do have to wait 20 hours to join another club, so be careful. If your club is hitting the club challenge most days and getting you the 8mil-12mil, it's probably fine to stay. You will get coins from the club challenges once per day, the league ranking thing (every few days? weekly? not sure), and you can harvest coins from the club newsfeed by liking people's posts.

2) Friend 200 people (the maximum) ASAP. Tons of people will send free coins to their friend list all the time, and you get a daily bonus for having friends. You can click on people in your club and friend them, as well as click on people at tables and friend them.

3) Connect the game to Facebook. Use a burner account to make it easier. This makes you a "VIP" and gets you more free coins. Every time you get a mega or epic win, click the "share" button and you'll get 100,000-5million coins in your inbox. It credits even if it's a simple "share" button vs. the "share on Facebook to get coins" button. If it isn't a burner account, change each post to "only me" rather than "public" or "friends" so you don't annoy people. Or, I guess you could create a Facebook post just for Swagbucks purposes, and people could click on each other's posts to get free coins. I'm not much of a Facebook person, but I'm guessing there are groups for the game, so you could find friends there. Also, go to the Club Vegas Slots Facebook page every day and click for 300,000 free coins.

4) Do the daily/master/expert challenges as they show up. Use slots that allow low bets (Triple 7s, and others that show up in the daily free spins) to complete the items that require a total number of spins or number of wins. Don't make a purchase unless you're really stuck and you know you can get to Level 90 within 14 days or so. Oh, and the wolf game with the party bonus can be a good one for cranking out wins, but the party bonus games don't count as free games. There are a couple others with party bonus, and they don't count either. The Spin of Fortune one and most others do count as free games.

5) In general, don't bet more than 1% of your total coins. Betting more will use up your coins too fast before you have a chance to hit many wins or free games. The game levels up based on how many coins you're betting. Free games don't count, but obviously you want to play as many as possible so you have coins to spend.

6) As far as I can tell, there aren't slots that "do better" than others in terms of winning and/or free games. The official FAQ says the slots use a random number generator to determine the odds. It's unclear whether the odds remain per turn, for a certain block of time, a certain number of wins, or for the entire length you stay in the slot. I am leaning toward thinking it's for a certain block of time. I typically go into a slot, spin 10-20 times at a low bet, and if I'm not getting free games or wins by then, I leave. If it's doing well, I increase the bid up to 1-10%, and I stay as long as it's still doing well. It will tend to hit a ton of free games and mega/epic wins, then it will drop off fairly suddenly, which is when you leave.

7) Collect the time bonus coins as soon as you're able. Set alarms if you have work to do and can't actually play the game, but can click in every 20 minutes just to click the bonus coins. If you have the time, watch the videos as well to get the extra coins. The time bonus coins will get you the lucky spins, which gets you daily challenge points, free coins, and sometimes leads you to a slot that's set for a ton of wins. If it's winning, stay there and spend some coins. If not, leave.

8) Some of the side quests get you coins quickly. Others are a waste of time. The epic album is a good way to get gems.

9) The gems can be used to buy free spins once you have 150 or so. Go into games and there's a price at the bottom to buy free spins. You can click left if the default requires 2000 coins or something, and if it's a game that allows lower bids, there will be one for 150-180 gems. 

10) The Super Buffalo game is hilarious. Play with sound on and thank me later.

11) The good folks at r/SwagBucks have probably answered most questions people might have about this game, or feel free to leave me a comment and ask.

As usual, if you don't have Swagbucks yet, please click through on my Swagbucks label and use my referral link. Thanks!

Swagbucks seems to be sucking again

Desktop surveys is full of the ones that collect your usable data for 10-15 minutes, then say you aren't eligible. It looks like support is no longer addressing these tickets or removing the scammers (even if you put "survey error" in the heading) and is just replying with a form letter explaining how disqualification works.

Bad Swago is up right now. Meh.

There aren't a lot of great Discover offers either.

It's still worth having it logged in for the cash back on online purchases, but there doesn't seem to be much worth spending a lot of time on at the moment.

All I need is one referral to get my $13 Swago board

Look at that. One lousy square away. I even posted on Reddit to pay someone $2 to sign up.

#whyamilikethis 

Lots of good bonuses at Swagbucks today and this week

Swagbucks is having a 13th birthday celebration today. The Swago board this week is worth $13 instead of $1-$5, and spins are back. You do have to do one in-store deal, which, WTF Swagbucks, it's a damn pandemic, so quit encouraging people to go places. It has some "any brand" ones that work in any store though, so all you have to do is buy any type of cereal in any store to get it.

Here's how I've been doing with Swagbucks lately. It's hit or miss whether it's worth it, but it's been good lately:

Also, I'm back to heavily scraping, so I'm really needing the Amazon cards to buy drugstore items and whatnot, so I'm very grateful Swagbucks has been good lately. Hoping it stays that way.

If you need a new pyramid scheme, this is a good time to sign up. My referral link is: https://www.swagbucks.com/refer/Locomotive1313. Go there, sign up, start doing Swagbucks things and we both get free gift cards. Also, http://www.reddit.com/r/swagbucks is a great source of info on which offers to do.

Lands End is having massive sale on everything

Winter boots are $25 for kids, $35 for adults. Terry robes are $35. Sale is obvious; it pops up and tells you what code to use to get the price.

Don't forget to enter the site through Swagbucks to get 8% cash back. 

Old Navy has winter jackets for $16-18 today only

Click here. They also have $10 jeans, though not many options.

Also make sure to get 2% back in Swagbucks.

Pop Slots on Swagbucks: free $25 for doing pretty much nothing

The offer is here for 2500 SB. I also saw it kicking around for 2986 or some odd number of SB, but I can't find it. EDIT: Here is the link for 2960 SB.

Go there, download the game. I made sure to go to Swagbucks on the phone browser, thinking this might help make sure it was tracked correctly. Nothing showed on Swagbucks at all for a few days, then I got an e-mail saying I had completed the offer and my SB would be pending.

Completing Level 27 on the game is very easy. The game awards XP for every slot machine win, proportionate to the amount of the win. Go to the Pop Slots Facebook and Twitter page, click into their posts, and pretty much every one has a link that will give you between 500,000 and 2,000,000 chips or coins or whatever they are. Then go to a slot machine, place the maximum bid, put it on auto spin until you run out of money. As you level up, the maximum bids go up, so go in and increase them. You unfortunately can't play this completely passively as far as I know, as the games will go into bonus rounds that require clicking to accept the coins you win after it finishes. I got to Level 26 in probably a total of two hours playing, which I was able to do while working on other things since I just had to click "accept" any time I glanced over and saw a bonus round had finished.

The game also earns you points that give you fairly substantial coupons for hotel stays and bus tours and other travel-related items. I assume the companies are all owned by the same folks. I didn't look too closely, but it looks like they are likely good deals if these were things you already planned on purchasing.

The game itself is a bit boring, though it's also aesthetically pleasing and doesn't have ads. (I mean, aside from how the whole thing is an advertisement.)

Completely free HelloFresh boxes

HelloFresh is back on Swagbucks. You get 1000 Swagbucks for signing up for a plan that includes a percentage off your first several boxes. If you pick two meals per week for two people, the first box ends up being $10.95 including shipping ($40 off). The next box is $30 off, so, $20.95. Then the next two are $10 off, so $40.95.

I set my HelloFresh to send me the first box right away and paid $10.95. Then I skipped several weeks. My Swagbucks credited, which means I got the box for free, or actually a negative dollar or so. (You can redeem Swagbucks to get a $25 Visa gift card for 2175 SB, and then add the $25 to your Amazon account which gets you $25.50, which means 1000 SB = $11.70 using them this way.)

You know how I've mentioned that the cat is an asshole? And how the cat is such an asshole that I made a label just for all the times the cat shows up and bothers things that I'm trying to blog? Well, the cat is an asshole. Seriously cat, no one said you could go and stand on the HelloFresh box and make a judgy face like that.

If you don't already use Swagbucks, my referral link is: https://www.swagbucks.com/refer/Locomotive1313

When I signed up for HelloFresh, it gave me four free boxes (six meals each box) to send to other people. They are actually free, including shipping. You will need a credit/debit card (I suggest one of the Swagbucks Visa gift cards for these sorts of subscription things so you aren't risking it charging your actual bank account) on which it can run a pending charge of a dollar. I still have two free boxes left to send to people. Note: When you click on the e-mail to redeem the offer, it will commit you to receiving the free box for the upcoming week, so don't click yet if you have other plans for next week, and check out the menus here to make sure there are things you want.

First two people to comment with an e-mail address to which I can send an invite will get a free box of six meals. 

Preference for people who are struggling to afford food, can't get benefits or enough benefits, etc. I won't require proof, but please be honest.

Wheeee more free Amazon money, from different places this time

OK, this is pretty great when things like this just show up in my inbox.

The $100 one, I'm not even sure what it's from. The company name was a pretty generic research project name. I've frequently gotten offers on Swagbucks and MTurk and other places to provide them with additional feedback either to enter to win an Amazon gift card or to get an Amazon gift card. I generally figure, why not, I have a lot of time and not a lot of money, so I might as well help out and see what happens. The thank-you message suggested it was from a survey and was their thanks for my helping them out, not from winning a drawing. Note: I don't do this when it's something that sounds scammy, and I typically don't volunteer my time for market research around consumer products. I will if it's nonprofit-type research.


The $75 one was also a surprise; a friend who works in healthcare patient-experience research posted on social media looking for people who could comment about practices and policies in our various states of residence, and I responded with some personal experiences and a lot of links to pages on state/hospital/university websites that I found on the google. The friend's project director e-mailed and thanked me for the information and asked me what my pay rate was for this type of work. Damn, apparently 1) I've apparently been working in the wrong fields, since I assumed she was looking for volunteer assistance and 2) I apparently need to set pay rates for things! I just responded to him that it took about 30 minutes of work, and I hadn't expected anything for it. He responded with the $75 Amazon card and said he hoped it was enough. Um, OK!

I guess the moral of this story is, be nice. Do things without expecting anything in return, and you may just get something tangible in return. And if you don't, then you still come out ahead. Also, apparently we all need to look into which fields have a ton of money lying around and very different standards in terms of what people are worth. And be sure to set your pay rate.

Oh, and people who are new to having a large portion of your family income be in Amazon gift cards; spend some time checking out what all Amazon sells. They sell damn near everything, and their prices are often the best ones for new items, except for some IKEA and Dollar Tree items. I've bought nonperishable groceries items, hygiene items, office supplies, books obviously, snow boots, other clothing items, electronics, bike parts, cat food, cat litter, etc. I think I'm going to use my current bounty for an actual new printer, or perhaps an actual new vacuum. I am pretty damn handy at fixing printers and vacuums that people have thrown out, but sometimes it's nice to have reliable things for once.

How to get Swagbucks gold surveys to credit when they kick you out

I'm putting this in a separate post, because it's come up a lot.

So, if you do a gold survey that asks you more than basic demographic information and a couple screening questions and then boots you out, put in a help ticket and select "survey error," then summarize what happened and be sure to say they got a ton of useful data without paying you. Say something like, "Spent 8 minutes answering questions about my demographics, everywhere I've traveled by plane, and my opinion about different airlines, before it said I wasn't eligible for their survey. They got a lot of usable data without paying for it." Oh, and gold surveys open in a second tab. Leave the one underneath open so you can go back and see the survey number and number of Swagbucks promised so you have this for your help ticket.

When you get the e-mail, be sure to respond and say it's correct. It often eats the amount of Swagbucks, so fill it in if it's not there.

I've had 100% luck doing this over the past month when they haven't credited. I've done 1-2 per day most days. As always with this stuff, don't abuse it, because they'll ban you, and because they'll take away these type of good-faith measures if people are taking advantage of them. Only fill out a ticket if it does in fact collect a bunch of usable data before booting you

(If only they'd credit my goddamned Capital One card deal though.)

Get six bottles of wine for free

The Bright Cellars offer on Swagbucks is legit. You sign up, they send you six bottles of wine for a total of $53.66 charged to your card (I think that includes state tax, so it may vary), six bottles of wine show up, and then you get 5000 Swagbucks, which you can redeem for about $50-$56 in Amazon or Visa gift cards (depending when you redeem them, what swag ups you have, and so forth).

Compared to the last free wine deal they had, this one gets you six bottles instead of four, but the labels aren't as interesting (hey, I choose my wine largely by if the label is cool) and you don't get to choose the individual wines, or at least I couldn't figure out how. They have you take quizzes and then match you with six bottles they think you'll like. The only customization options I could find were to select that you flat-out don't want chardonnay or pinot noir or whatever. Oh well, it's free wine. I highly recommend doing this. Even if you aren't really a wine person, you'll have bottles of wine to take when you go somewhere for dinner or whatever.

This is a subscription service like most of these, so be sure to put it on your calendar to cancel. The Swagbucks are pending for a month, so I went onto Bright Cellars and selected "skip my next shipment." and then I will cancel once I get the Swagbucks.

Here is the screenshot of the wines it gave me, and how the pricing is supposed to work out. If it's charging you much more, you did something wrong. Also, a photo of the wines. I haven't unpacked it yet, because we're doing some home repairs and our kitchen is taken apart right now. But I assume it's the same thing in the box that the order shows.

This thing about the corkscrew actually made me laugh out loud. What can I say? I'm kind of a 12-year-old boy.

Ridiculous employment categories on surveys

So, I do a lot of surveys, between Swagbucks and Mechanical Turk. As I complete them, my brain seems to have developed a hobby of assessing survey design. Most of the bad questions I come across tend to have the flaw of breaking down options so that most people would fall into the "other" category – and sometimes they don't even offer one, so respondents are required to pick a choice that is not remotely close to the truth.

A particularly laughable one I keep coming across is the ones that ask what category your role at work falls into, and then have options of:

CEO
President
Vice President
Senior Management
Junior Management
Supervisor
Person who sweeps the parking lot

Putting aside for a minute the idea of CEOs and such doing surveys on Swagbucks, are these people not aware that many (most?) skilled employees are not in any sort of management position? These aren't surveys that are only screening in management folks. They ask if you are employed, and then they ask which managerial rank you hold. They sometimes only have managerial ranks, or sometimes they have managerial ranks plus an option like "clerical." There's no option for most of the people who do most of the work most places.

Just what kind of workplaces are these folks coming from and basing their model on? Where are these places where you have clerical people, then a bunch of managers? What exactly are the clerical people doing paperwork/communication for? What are the managers managing? How does any work get done in this place?

Swagbucks monthly bonus is pretty sweet

This was for reaching the first daily goal every day in February, and the second goal periodically. 

Swagbucks isn't crediting me for the Capital One card offer

Here is the original offer. "Earn 5000 SB when you are approved for your new card!" And the disclaimer, stating it will appear as pending and so forth, but nothing saying it must be automatic approval.

So, thing didn't approve, I unfortunately didn't screenshot the page saying they needed more information and I would hear from them or whatever, because I assumed I hadn't gotten approved.

A couple weeks later, this lovely letter showed up, stating I'd been approved. (We'll discuss at some future time Why Capital One Thinks Giving My Broke Ass a $10,000 Credit Limit Is Any Sort Of Good Idea.)

I opened a help ticket, with the photo of the letter. I received this response:

 

I sent them my reply, along with these two images:

Apparently the e-mail address documentation is sufficient (despite that screen not showing anything connecting it to the credit card in question), but they still need a date of approval. Which Capital One hasn't ever sent me. Also, this person keeps calling photos "screenshots" and asking for screenshots of paper mail. While I certainly have sympathy for people with shitty jobs, I don't think I'm dealing with someone who has a lot of critical thinking skills.

My reply:

Their reply, this time saying they won't approve it:

 

And me invoking contract language (which I'm actually not at all sure is applicable, but it can't hurt to try, right?):

And here's a chat with Capital One, verifying the date the card was approved, since Swagbucks claimed that was the holdup.

The Capital One person didn't have any way to verify I came there via Swagbucks and wasn't sure how to contact the advertising or referral program or whatever that would be, though she was very nice and helpful and tried to look up as many things as she could think of. Thanks Sandra at Capital One, you're awesome.

EDIT MARCH 1: I e-mailed a hotline Capital One has for complaining about unethical third party behavior. Maybe that will work?

Visa gift cards are a better deal than Amazon on Swagbucks right now

Right now, $10 Visa gift cards are 990SB, plus you can get 80SB back if you have 80SB rebates from the most recent Swago. So, 910SB each.

Note: The one $25 Amazon card per month is still the best deal. Do one of these per month, then do the rest in Visa cards.

Today I discovered if you use them to reload your balance on Amazon, you can get 20 cents extra added to your gift card balance. You do have to have a checking account saved as one of your Amazon payment methods, but once you do, it will give you a 2% bonus on anything it considers a debit card, which includes these Visa cards.

Another thing I learned: Don't consolidate your $10 Visa gift cards into one larger card, unless you are ordering a physical card for something and you really need to do this. The Visa card website gives you the option to save the card in the digital wallet for later, telling you you can consolidate it. I did this a few days ago when I had five $10 cards. Then when you actually go to consolidate it, it takes a 5% or something fee. At this point, you can't take your card back out of the wallet, so you have to pay the fee. I ended up with a $47.50 Visa gift card. Dammit. If you're just entering all the cards on Amazon, it doesn't bother anyone to have five $10 instead of one $50, so save your money by entering each one.

Thrift store haul, tried out Swagbucks local

I went to Savers in (Framingham? Natick?) to make a Swagbucks local purchase and finish my Swago board. FYI, the local thing seems to work really well; probably more smoothly than most of Swagbucks. It immediately sent me an email saying the purchase was pending and immediately lit up the Swago square. Good stuff. 

So, someone apparently dropped off an entire wardrobe of Justice stuff. I got all this amazing stuff for like $20. (The nondescript black blob is an Express cardigan; see second attempt to photograph all-black item without way overexposing photo. You may have to just imagine it.) There was a ton more Justice size 10/12/14 there too, if anyone needs such things. They’re usually low on girls’ L/women’s XS things, so this was nice to find. 

Swagbucks: Fuck yeah

Finished the Swago board and got my 500SB, plus the spins, which got me a bunch of 80SB rebates on $10 Visa gift cards. 

I currently have six of them pending. Word. 



And $125 received since 02/01/19. So I’ve made $185 in three weeks doing pretty much nothing, just clicking on things while I do other stuff. 



Today was a good day. #didnotatanypointneedtouseAK

Swagbucks has really been hopping lately; I've been pulling in $25-$50 per week at least

Swagbucks has tightened things up and is actually useful again. They're doing some new things:

• SwagIQ, a live trivia game on Monday-Thursday evenings, in which you can win 3-4 cents just for playing, and up to $50 or so if you get all 10 questions right
• Swago, a bingo board that gets you a ton of bonuses and Swag-ups (power-ups that get you an added bonus on future tasks) for completing various patterns ranging from one line across to the whole board

They're also continually setting it up to be, well, a pyramid scheme inside a pyramid scheme, in that the more often you use Swagbucks and earn, the more you get bonuses and Swag-ups and other things that increase how much you earn when you do the tasks. It's definitely worth it if you are able to spend half an hour or so on it per day.

Here's my Swagbucks routine:

1. Do the daily to-do list, on the left sidebar of the main Swagbucks page. 
2. Go to the Reddit Swagbucks forum to see which "Discover" activities are legit and worth the time
3. Make sure to make my first daily goal each day. This gets me between about 5 and 15 bonus Swagbucks per day when the month is over, and also gets me 300 bonus for completing it every day of the month.
4. Set the SBTV app on my phone to passively earn 10 or so SB. (Do this by adding at least one video to "favorites," set it to play via the favorites bookmark in the sidebar, and then it will play through the playlist passively. It may periodically pull up an add that requires you to manually X out of it to continue.)
5. If you still need Swagbucks after doing Discover, do gold surveys. Also the EntertaiNow and Sport.ly apps are hit or miss, but try them periodically. SB Bowling is not worth it unless you're really good at bowling on your phone. It's something like 1-2 Swagbucks per game unless you can bowl 300, and then you get 25. 

Other things that are good to know:

1. They've been good lately at crediting for deals that don't work properly. If something doesn't show up as pending or doesn't credit you properly, go here and fill out a help ticket. For Discover and shop deals, always take a screenshot of the offer before you try it, and screenshots of everything else relevant. When they e-mail you saying they're just making sure they have the information correct, respond to them. It can sometimes take a few weeks, but in the past couple of months, I have always had them eventually credit me even if the offer didn't track correctly. Also, make sure you aren't using adblockers when doing Swagbucks deals, because it gets in the way of their cookies. Consider using one browser for your Swagbucks and other such things, with all extensions turned off, and a second browser for your normal usage where you can turn on adblockers and all that.
2. If you do a gold survey that asks you more than basic demographic information and then boots you out, put in a help ticket and select "survey error," then summarize what happened and be sure to say they got a ton of useful data without paying you. Say something like, "Spent 8 minutes answering questions about my demographics, everywhere I've traveled by plane, and my opinion about different airlines, before it said I wasn't eligible for their survey. They got a lot of usable data without paying for it." Oh, and gold surveys open in a second tab. Leave the one underneath open so you can go back and see the survey number and number of Swagbucks promised so you have this for your help ticket. Again, when you get the e-mail, respond and say it's correct. They usually credit for surveys within the day.

If you haven't signed up for Swagbucks, please sign up using my referral link. Even if you aren't sure you'll use it, if my posts have helped you scrape by in Boston or elsewhere, please sign up this week so I can get a referral for my Swago board. Thanks!

Please comment with any questions about getting Swagbucks to work better, and I'm happy to answer them.

Hello Fresh allows stacking Swagbucks discount and regular discount to get three meals for $10

Swagbucks has a Discover offer right now that gets you 1000 Swagbucks (about $10, or more if you redeem for cards that are on sale) for signing up for Hello Fresh (which, if you pay attention here at all, you know that you cancel it after the first week once it's no longer steeply discounted). The normal charge for a week of meals is $60, you'll get $10 back from Swagbucks, and if you use the code I have, you'll get $40 off. Most of these deals don't let you enter a promo code if you've gotten there through a referral code, but it works for Hello Fresh. I got my 1000 Swagbucks, plus it applied the $40 discount code I got from a friend.

So, go here and sign up for Swagbucks using my referral code if you don't already have an account, then search for Hello Fresh, find the one with 1000 Swagbucks back for joining (remember to always screenshot the deal in case it doesn't credit correctly), go join and put in your information, then come back here and click through using my code. Or you may have to type it in, I'm not sure. It worked for one person via clicking the link and another person had to manually input it.

As always, comment with any Swagbucks questions and I'll answer them.