Disclaimer: the article contains some referral links which will give me monetary incentives when you sign up the programs by using the links. You do not have to use my referral links, but I would greatly appreciate if you do.

Holiday shopping is stressful and stretches everyone’s budget, including mine. But fortunately I have been earning extra cash throughout the year to prepare for the potential budget overhaul. I earned around $600 extra cash in a year WITHOUT much extra work and the key point here is I didn’t need to do much extra work to get the cash. If you are interested in how I did it, then read on.

I participated two cash reward programs because they require minimum work to get extra cash: Swagbucks and SurveySavvy. I have covered Swagbucks in detail in my previous post, and you can follow that post to earn sizeable amount of cash if you are willing to put lots of effort, but here I will only focus on how to use Swagbucks to earn about $1 per day very very easily (that is around $35 per month easy money, I will explain why later), let’s begin.

Swagbucks

What Do You Need

• A good computer (with 8GB RAM at least) with the Internet connection, of course
• VirtualBox (free virtual machine software can be downloaded from www.virtualbox.org)

How To Do It

1. You need to join Swagbucks for free (if you use my referral link to join, you will get an extra $3)

2. Download and install VirtualBox on your computer, then install a Linux operating system in VirtualBox with 2GB RAM. I recommend Linux Mint or Zorin OS if you are new to Linux. Don’t worry, it’s very easy to install Linux in VirtualBox, for example, you can follow my post to install Zorin OS.

3. Launch your web browser (FireFox comes by default after you install Linux, but you can install Google Chrome in Linux if you like to) in Linux which is just installed, log into your Swagbucks account. Click “Watch” from the left menu, then click “nCrave”. Choose any video that has a “Discovery Mode” to run it. In the “Discovery Mode”, the videos on the playlist will play one by one automatically, so you don’t need to do anything.

4. While the video is playing by itself, you can switch back to your Windows to do your own thing. Swagbucks nCrave requires you to keep your mouse on the page which the video is playing, however, since the video is running in a virtual machine, it will still think your mouse is one the page, even though you are working in Windows (outside the virtual box). So you can continue to do your work while nCrave is playing by itself, and once it is finished, choose another video and repeat.

5. Swagbucks gives you two daily goals to challenge you to meet and when you meet the first goal, you will be rewarded with an extra 10% of the amount of the first goal. If you meet the second goal, then you will be rewarded another extra 10% of the amount of the second goal, besides the bonus from meeting the first goal. Your daily goal is set based on your previous earnings, so if you earned a lot in the previous month, then your next goal will increase; or if you missed the daily goals for many days in the previous month, then your daily goal for the next month will be lower. If you meet your first daily goal for 30 consecutive days in one month, then Swagbucks will reward you with extra 300SB. I make sure my first daily goal stays around 100SB (equally $1) because it requires minimum work to reach so I can get the extra 300SB at the end of the month.

6. How do I get around $35 per month without doing much work? My daily goal is around 100SB so if I meet my daily goal for 30 days, then I will get 30 X 100 X (1+10%)=3300SB at the end of the month by meeting my goal, then Swagbucks will add another 300SB bonus, so the total will be around 3600SB, which is $36.

SurveySavvy

As the name indicates, SurveySavvy is a program that rewards users with cash for the surveys they complete. Unlike the surveys in Swagbucks which you earn SB and then convert SB into cash, SurveySavvy issues real cash to users 4 to 6 weeks after the completion of a survey. Besides participating surveys, users in US can participate in a new promotion called Project Gold that allows users to earn $5 per month per device for installing SavvyConnect on their Internet connected devices. SavvyConnect sends anonymous information about users Internet usage back to the research company behind SurveySavvy and in exchange, it pays users for the data. You can install SavvyConnect on up to 3 devices as shown below and ear up to $15 per month. SurveySavvy only send checks to users upon request, and the minimum amount to be requested is $1.

The SavvyConnect runs in the background and does not need any interaction from you, so basically you are making $15 per month without doing anything extra. If you are interested in it, you can register an SurveySavvy account, then install SavvyConnect on your qualified devices to start earning.

So, WITHOUT much extra work, I can earn $50 per month and that is $600 per year extra cash that I can use to help out in any way I want.

Happy earning!