Free Money - Adding it All Up

Now that the year is over I decided to tally up how much "free money" I made throughout the year. This is money I made without doing any work, unless you count a couple extra clicks work.

Discover Card Cashback Bonus- This is our main credit card. We get 1% cash back on all purchases and 5% cash back on different purchases throughout the year. You can also get additional cashback when you shop online by clicking through from Discover's website. In 2009 we made $216.34 with Cashback Bonus.


Target Visa 10% Coupons - Our second credit card is the Target Visa. We pretty much only use this at Target. For every 1000 points you accumulate you get a 10% Target Coupon. You can also get them when you fill prescriptions at Target Pharmacy. I didn't track these throughout the year, but I estimate our savings from getting these coupons to be $30.00.

Swagbucks - I discovered Swagbucks almost a year ago now. Basically it's a search engine that lets you win Swagbucks when you search. You can then use your Swagbucks to purchase items. By far the best deal is buying the $5 Amazon Gift Cards with 45 Swagbucks. Over the course of the year I have bought $100 in Amazon Gift Cards that I used mainly to buy Christmas presents for my boys.

Ebates - Before my Discover Card became so great with it's online shopping bonuses I mainly used Ebates to link through for all my online shopping. Last year I earned $31.94 using Ebates.



Bing - Bing.com is another shopping site I discovered right before Christmas. It seems the cash back percentage can vary. At one point they had %20 cash back for Ebay purchases so I bought one of our more expensive Christmas presents at a great price with it. My total Bing cash back pending for 2009 was $25.61.



Altogether I made an extra $404!