Swagbucks and No Spend March

You guys already know about Swagbucks*, so I won't bore you with the details of how it works. But I did want to let you know that my casual use of it has netted me 165 dollars in Amazon money. I imagine I make an extra 5 dollars a month just searching, so that's cool.

If you're not a member, you should be. That being said, my new favorite thing is the Bing Rewards. I used to do Club Bing and that was boring as heck. In fact, I only cashed in points for airline miles. I can never get that time back again.

They just changed to a new system, so go ahead and check it out already. For simply following directions** I was able to get enough credits for 100 xBox live points. There are a lot points flying around.

Bing searches are pretty much identical to Swagbucks searches (try to stay with me) and the point systems are different and award at different levels. Either way you can fund your various and sundry habits hobbies with little to no interest/work/bandwidth.

So that brings us to March. This month George and I have decided to make it one of those classy "no spend" months. We can obviously spend money on groceries, personal care items and bills. We make the rules here.

Here's why: we used to use a cash only system when Jord brought in cash tips from work. In fact, we literally*** used envelopes. Paper ones. It was a great system, but that's just not the best thing for us right now. Fortunately, Mint is my digital envelopes, if my envelopes reminded me about my upcoming student loan payments.

Mint recently reminded me that we spend a little over 200 dollars on entertainment, eating out and other things that aren't necessary.

We also spent a little over 150 on mystery shopping. We'll get this back, but we're not doing that this month. We may wait until I get paid to start again, and use that as a revolving budget for restaurant shops.

350 extra dollars this month would be fantastic, you know? And when I'm in the middle of it, a quick pizza purchase seems to make a whole lot of sense. And sometimes, it really does. But we're going to try to just put that stuff off for this one month. We'll see how it goes.

Either way, it's just the 1st. Things are looking up.

*Gotcha! Or also: www.swagbucks.com
**Very simple. You do need to know how to read.
***Chris Traeger, anyone?