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Making Money Spotlight: Using CashCrate to Earn Some Extra Money
I recently created a post listing 45 ways to make some extra money. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it generated a lot of traffic to the site. With 45 different ideas listed, however, I couldn’t spend a lot of time going into detail on many of the ideas (none of the ideas, actually). So, I thought it would be useful to go into a bit more depth on some of the easiest ideas to generate some extra money online.
The easiest of the opportunities from the making money online section of that post are:
- Get paid to complete offers at CashCrate.com
- Get paid to take surveys at OpinionOutpost.com
- Get paid to search at Scour.com
- Review products and take online surveys at Vindale Research to earn money
Out of these, I am most familiar with CashCrate so I want to spotlight using it in this post.
Overview of CashCrate
Maybe they added more offers recently or maybe I just missed the good stuff earlier, but now there seems to be some worthwhile offers on the site. When I first signed up for CashCrate, I poked around the site a little bit and tried out a small offer just to check it out. I have to be honest, I wasn’t overly impressed by the opportunities presented by CashCrate at that time. The offers available today are much better, however.
CashCrate offers cash awards as well as points. You simply complete the offers as specified, click on the Submit button back on the CashCrate site, and your account will be updated with "Pending earnings." When CashCrate has confirmed that you fulfilled the offer, the money will be moved over to your Earnings column. They have a very low payout threshold - you only have to earn $10 to get a check from them the following month.
Focus on the significant offers
There are a number of small offers of below $1.00 - basically you sign up to be on various email mailing lists and CashCrate will give you a small amount of money. If you do this, I’d recommend that you create a separate email address. That way you can keep track of the offers without inundating your standard email address.
To find the highest payout opportunities, sort the offers by "Payout." There are some significant payout options here. As of this writing, the largest is $125 to sign up for DirectTV. That’s right, if you sign up for DirectTV, CashCrate will give you $125. Of course, signing up for DirectTV service is a significant commitment.
Where I think the most value is in the large payout offers (not as large as the DirectTV) that don’t require long-term commitments. The two categories I look at first are the free product/service trials and the shopping offers.
Earn Money by Signing up for Product and Service Trials
For instance, there are currently a number of product and service trials available for which CashCrate will pay you for signing up for the trial. Some of the trials do cost a little bit of money, but a number are free. I’m not suggesting signing up for a bunch of stuff that you have no interest in just to get a few dollars. If you are interested in trying a service like NetFlix or Blockbuster, however, I think it makes sense to do it through CashCrate and earn a little money for your efforts.
Get Cash back while Shopping
Similarly, if you are planning on doing some internet shopping, I think it makes sense to check out CashCrate on your way to see if there are any offers to get a little money back while shopping. Just tonight I purchased an item and got $10 back from CashCrate for doing so. There are some offers for cash back in the offers section (like my $10 offer) and there is also an entire section on shopping (this provides a percentage of the purchase price back). It isn’t a huge section, but it does have some big names there like ITunes, Office Depot, and Wal-Mart among others.
A word of caution, please do not go around buying stuff you don’t want or don’t need just to "earn" some money. You’re not really earning anything - you’re just "spending" money. But, if you are doing some shopping anyway, then you might as well reduce your overall cost by using a service like CashCrate. [Another similar service that is geared strictly toward shopping is Ebates.com - I think they have more shopping options. Again, shopping is spending money, NOT making money. If you spend $50 you weren't planning to spend to make $10, you've just wasted $40!]
Make Money through Referrals
Another method to make some money is to refer others to CashCrate. For each person you refer, CashCrate gives you a percentage of what they earn and also a bonus when they make some money. If some of your friends sign up through your affiliate program, then both of you will make some extra money.
My Summary of using CashCrate
So far, I have been pleasantly surprised with my CashCrate experience. I have made some money while exerting very little effort. And I was really excited to see that I could get $10 back from a $23 purchase that I was going to buy anyway! Certainly I’m not expecting to replace my current salary with my CashCrate earnings but every little bit helps. If you complete some higher payout offers (without spending too much money in the process) and have some of your friends sign up through your referral link, you’ll be able to make some extra spending money each month.
Signing up for CashCrate is free so my suggestion to you would be to sign up and check it out . Check out the FAQs on the lower left corner on the front page for more info. Look through the cash payouts focusing on the higher payout values first. I think you will probably see some that are interesting to you. If not, then you can just leave the site and never return again. But please, do not waste a bunch of money just to get a little bit back. Also, and this is very important, if you sign up for the free trials, do not forget to cancel them before the "free" part ends if you aren’t satisfied with the value provided.
If you have any bad experiences with CashCrate, I would really like to hear about them. I have had a good experience so far, but I don’t want to be endorsing a service with which others are having problems. Please leave a comment or contact me directly.
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5 Responses to “Making Money Spotlight: Using CashCrate to Earn Some Extra Money”
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Thanks for the link! I’ve found cash crate to be a pretty good way to make a little extra money every month - almost $70 for me this month. The one thing I HAVE found, however, is that you’ll get a lot of emails - so make sure to sign up for a separate email to use on the site.
Nice review!
Pete’s latest blog post…Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University: Week 13 - The Great Misunderstanding
Everyone, that sounds like an excellent piece of advice there from Pete.
This is great for people who shop, but I want to earn. I do not want to buy one more thing. Also it bothers me to have to use online banking. If I sell my stuff, I prefer to wair for a money order before shipping anything. Do other people feel the same?
@Nancy - that’s a good point as most of the cashcrate offers are geared around signing up for newsletters or buying things. Maybe try opinionoutpost.com for just taking surveys and such? And I always wait to get paid before shipping anything on ebay or whatever, but I don’t mind online banking. In fact, I use it as much as possible.
Hey John,
Great blog! Nice review of our site, as well. Thanks for the shout out, and have a great weekend!
Joe