Money Matters

 

HAPPY OCTOBER!!!!!! 

I am in the process of building back up my funds, points and gift cards across all of my accounts.  When my brother called me on August 12th and said my nephew had passed away, not only did I want to support him mentally and emotionally but I also wanted to ensure that he had the financial support.

Honey...I used all of my Walmart and Target gift cards. I used a lot of my Vons and Ralphs points to buy food, drinks and refreshments for the folks stopping by to offer their condolences. I was in Sacramento during the hottest period of the summer when it was 99 to 101 degrees. 

The thing is when there is a family emergency, we don't want to have to take up a collection to get things done. We put other expenses from our trip on one rewards credit card and we moved money from savings into checking to pay off the credit card because we don't carry on our credit cards.

If you are carrying a balance on a credit card do whatever is humanly possible to pay off the balance - create a budge, cut back on all unnecessary expenses, get a second job, sell blood at the blood bank, do the medical surveys (google medical surveys for money).  I am telling you that not having debt is peace of mind. 

I believe that he best things that keeps me out of debt is couponing, using the rebate apps and not being loyal to a particular product.  For example, it doesn't bother me to use Tide, Persil or Arm & Hammer laundry detergent as long as it is super cheap or free.

People get wrapped around the axel with being loyal to a particular brand or manufacturer.  I get wrapped around the axel about saving money because everything has gone up exponentially without exception.  

Y'all know that I will beat a dead horse to death, again by repeating a particular Money Maker over and over and over until we are all on the same page...and winning!

The holidays is coming up as Thanksgiving is next month and Christmas is right behind.  You have got to get yourself together and create a Thanksgiving menu then create a Christmas gift list for family and friends.  

While I was in Sacramento, my brother, Dave, washed his car at the car wash every two or three days because he has a car wash subscription service.  Guess what I am getting my middle brother for Christmas - a subscription car wash service!😃

I was trying to figure out how the Swagbucks would add offers and I'd activate the offers only for a few hours later for the offers to disappear...very frustrating.  Last weekend, we had something going on with our internet.  It kept going up and down and at some point when the internet was up, I'd loaded a receipt to Alexa for my purchase of the Raid but what I didn't know is that my internet had went down during the upload and I became distracted before I realize that there was a problem.  I then got an error message to reload the receipt and it became a cluster because I guess their software couldn't figure what I was trying to do...and they gave me a double credit for the Raid.

Speaking of the Raid, I had submitted my receipt to Fetch Rewards and I won 3,000 ($3) points and before that, the most I'd won with Fetch is 750 ($0.75) points.  My original intent of my $3 clearance Raid purchase was to get back $2 from Ibotta and $2 from Shopmium and call it the day because Alexa nor Bing was playing nicely with me so imagine my surprise when the $2 Raid offer popped up on Swagbucks, $2 Shopmium, $2 Alexa and $2 Ibotaa all paid me out making the purchase an $8 Money Maker!!!

I received $127.42 from Ibotta, $75 in Target gift cards from Swagbucks, $25 Amazon gift card from Fetch Rewards, $5 Amazon gift card from Merryfield and $50 PayPal from Shopkick.

I received $48 from Shopkicks and $36 from Alexa. I don't think that I was consistent is submitting receipts to Alexa because a month or two ago, I was having a problem with Alexa processing my receipts but Alexas was very generous with the Progresso soup bc I got credit for (4) $1/3 (as well as the same on Shopmium).

Below are my favorite deals for the month of September:

$16.10 MM Progresso Soup

$9.58 MM Kind Bars

$8 Raid MM