Interesting read, thanks for sharing. I suppose that online surveys may generate a few extra dollars on the side for some people, but it does require you to qualify for certain surveys online. In many cases you may not qualify, and will result in having to search for more surveys. This can be time consuming and in most cases not as profitable as may be expected.
Inboxdollars Andrew Smith
I signed up for InBox Dollars, which led to a rabbit hole of sweepstakes and surveys, all of which, had the same 30 questions repeated 2-3 times in a single survey, punctuated by attempts at selling magazine subscriptions. One survey had a couple of telling questions. “Do you believe Trump is the best President America has ever had?” “Do you believe Hillary Clinton should be convicted of a crime?” and “Is Fox your main source of news?” I started getting an ungodly amount of spam emails and I can’t even count the number of spam calls, that are now growing at a rate of about 18 per day. I can’t block them fast enough, though one number has called 21 times in the past 3 days. 11 of those tries were yesterday. Today they only called 5 times… I just started mass spam dumping from my inbox. I don’t even care what’s in the message. If it’s not something I know. DELETE DELETE DELETE! I received a Netspend card in the mail today. Wasn’t able to activate it though.
You can also watch short videos and earn cash. This is not all about watching boring commercials. The cash TV channel consists of categories like Celebrities, Food/ Recipes, Entertainment, and more; and what you’ll be viewing include movie previews, TV shows, news etc. You can earn by simply using the Inbox Dollars search engine to do your normal web searches. For any four searches you make, you’ll earn $0.01 and three entries into their sweepstake/ prize draw.
The minimum payment threshold is 25,000 points. Once you’ve accumulated that many points, you can redeem them for gift vouchers from major retailers such as Target, Amazon, Walmart, Starbucks, iTunes, Sports Authority, Papa Johns, and more. After the first withdrawal, you don’t need to meet any minimum requirement for further cash outs. You can redeem as low as 1,000 ($1.00) for some e-vouchers.
From the get-go, new members will instantly earn their first $5. The process of signing up is extremely easy and simple – enter your email, create a password and confirm your account via email. Then, you will need to answer several basic questions that are on par with every other survey panel (i.e. about your marital status, kids, degree, race, income etc).
Here’s my experience with InboxDollars. I was a member for over 5 years. I cancelled my membership about 3 years ago. Frank is right. They should’ve called themselves InboxPennies, and that’s exactly what it’s worth, pennies. I didn’t take a lot of surveys because you won’t qualify for many of them. I also didn’t do any of the trial offers because I don’t trust giving out my credit card info to these crooks, plus I was looking to make money, not spend it. But, I did all of the paid emails, and they amounted to about 3 or 4 cents per paid email. The minimum payout is $30. I made about $2 or $3 a month. Now you do the math on this one. I remember it taking about 12 months or longer to reach payout of $30! I even signed up a few referrals and never made anything; I guess they figured it wasn’t worth their time. InboxDollars should be shut down. Getting paid pennies is a direct insult to anyone’s intelligence. There are too many of these type companies that sucker you into believing you’ll make some decent money. Nobody’s trying to get rich, but at least a real part-time job will pay you about 200 bucks a week. We all have been bamboozled and hoodwinked.
Hi! I'm Jeff. A personal finance nerd and entrepreneur at heart, I'm here to bring you all the latest cool ways to make and save extra money. I've been quoted in several online publications, including Entrepreneur, NBC News, GoBankingRates, Student Loan Hero, Business.com, Credit Karma, The Simple Dollar, US News & World Report, Lifehacker, MSN Money, Moneyish, Zumper, IdeaMensch, Discover Bank, PrimeRates, Credit.com, Yahoo! Finance, Club Thrifty, Guru Focus, Rent Track, Fit Small Business, Coupon Chief, and more.
How it works: LifePoints is the survey platform of a company called Lightspeed, which is owned by Kantar (one of the world’s largest market research and consumer data analytics firms). The platform was formed as a merger of two of the company’s other products, MySurvey and Global Test Market, and gives users a variety of ways to earn points that can be redeemed for cash: