Hi, I'm Zina! I'm a personal finance expert with a passion for helping millennials figure out their most pressing financial issues. My interest is personal -- I paid off my student loans in three years and have been helping others take control of their finances ever since. My work has been featured in the Washington Post, Fox Business, Time, Quicken Loans, LendingTree, Forbes, Money.com, Mint, and many more.  I currently live in Indianapolis, IN with my husband and two dogs.

InboxDollars is one of the worst programs. Unlike others, they have a very short “6-months of inactivity and we’ll close your account and keep your money” term. Plus, you earn next to nothing. I too stopped getting paid emails and tried to unsuccessfully qualify for surveys. As such, I mostly did the big-ticket things, like signing up for money back on donations to charities. I accrued $98 and log in monthly to avoid the “inactivity” thing. But, guess what? They just closed my account for not completing anything in six months. They don’t even hold up their own definition of “activity”. So, user beware–withdraw when you can, even though UNLIKE the other programs, they charge a 3% fee on what you’ve earned. Sketchy, sketchy, sketchy.
I have tosay that by joining the survey sites that you haveon your list i have madeover 300.00in the last 6 months doing surveys and watching videos so if you have the timetospend doingsurveys you wont makea whole lot of money but you will enjoy the survey opportunititys and every little bit will add up if you join all of these except panda research which is known for sending your money to someone elsed paypal account because it happened to me about 2 years ago andthey took 186.00 from me.

If this is remotely true, it is absolutely the exception to the rule. Yes, they take all of your info, then you spend endless amounts of time filling out the prequal for a survey only to get disqualified. If you do happen to be qualified, well the 15-30+minutes you spend to “make” that 25-50 CENTS is NOT worth the time. Again the user claiming to make anywhere decent amounts of money from this is the exception rather than the rule. Don’t waste your time.


In a few cases, InboxDollars directed me to “exclusive offers” instead of straightforward surveys. One required me to give my name, address, phone number and birthdate to earn money and enter a sweepstakes for a Target gift card. Another time, I was prompted to give my email address and choose between Coke and Pepsi in exchange for $1 and a sweepstakes entry. I didn’t want to give my contact information to what appeared to be third-party sites, so I clicked out of these promotions.
Inbox dollars is a scam. They will pull you in by offering $5 to begin and another $7 for completing some other tasks. It all goes downhill from there. I quickly realized that filling out countless surveys. I really gave them a try, I tried and tried and tried. Finally I snapped and said “No More!” What happens is that once you start a survey and it could be 15-20 minutes of filling questions, they will reject you based on answering a question as “no”. So you could answer “yes, yes, yes” for multiple questions and after 20 minutes of tedious (and yes, boooring!) questioning you are rejected from survey by punching one lousy “No”. Then they offer “sweeps” which is a raffle ticket that will never win you anything, pathetic! So, after seeing what a sham I got myself into I just decided to get my $30 by strictly opening the “paid mail” and using “paid search”. I had opened the account with them 1.5 years ago and finally was able to collect my $30 (actually $27, they even take $3 for “processing fee” – a final slap in the face) after countless hours of filling surveys and opening stupid paid mail. They pay 2 cents per one paid e-mail so yes it will take a while. I will be closing my account with inbox dollars now that I recovered a small fraction of what my time is actually worth, and I recommend staying clear from them and finding another way of making $$$.
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