Frugal For Life

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From reader Tricia:
I am interested in possibly starting to do some online surveys from home, and was wondering if you had any advice on which ones were best (most legit). You hear about all these scams out there, and I wondered which ones were truly worth doing, and that will pay! (obviously).
Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated-
Tricia

Tricia,
Thanks for reading FFL and thanks for writing. You would think that with a frugal site I would have written more on this, but sadly I have only written about this once, when I was part of a local focus group and got $75 for my troubles.

I think that I haven’t written much about this for a couple of reasons:
1. I rarely have time to take even 10 minutes to fill out a survey and when I do, they are expired
2. I have had some bad luck with them - spam and no payment

With that said I have some experience but not a lot. I will share what I have found:

The most important item about paid surveys - HAVE A SEPARATE EMAIL ADDRESS for surveys only. You WILL get spam and you don’t want it cluttering up the email address that you use for your friends and family, sorting through it all suxs. (I like yahoo or gmail as they have a pretty good spam blocker)
The second most important item about surveys or filling out samples - HAVE AN ‘ALTERNATE’ NAME because you will get junk-mail at your address as well. I use my initials with a unique spelling of my last name so that I know how it came (I signed up for something and they sold my ‘alternate’ name)

Now that you have those in place, these are the sites that I use to make money or points towards money.

$Pinecone Research - I used to get about one survey($5) a month from them, but since I am a low-end consumer they have pretty much stopped sending me stuff. I see that they are asking for 18-34 males right now. But you can see banners around the web on occasion- They disappear quickly so sign up right away when you see them.

$ MyPoints - This sites offers gift cards ($5/10/25+) that you can turn in your points for. You can either buy items that apply points to your account or you can just click on the emails and get points without buying. I click on the emails (5-50 points each) and don’t buy anything. It is that easy.
I himhawed around about this one until I saw a post from Mbhunter’s experience with Mypoints and I finally signed up. That was back in August of 2007 and 6 months later I am a couple hundred away from getting the $25 gift card I have been aiming for. It is slow going with the points, but the gift cards are decent for the little amount of work I do. On the occasion that I buy online, I will go through them to get my points (plus using a coupon code)

Those are the only sites that I use that don’t involve me to go anywhere. The other ’surveys’ that I do are to partake in focus groups. They do have some focus groups that are via the phone, but they are rare where I am.

$ Greenbook - I like this site, the focus groups I have found have been legit. I get notices via email that have me fill out a form if I qualify for their medical/entertainment/therapy/etc. focus group. These usually pay 50.00 or more and appear to be best for those who live near a larger metropolitan. So far I have only had time for one focus group, the Spiderman focus group got me $75. But then I am only signed up with one company. It would be best to be signed up for a couple since they sometimes have rules about waiting 3-6 months before you can do another one. It also seems that focus groups are usually on weekday nights - sadly, I work then.

Otherwise, I have once joined one of these - Greenfield and Survey Savvy but I don’t recall going very far with them, if I recall correctly, I never qualified for their surveys so I canceled. But I hear some good things about them.

There you have it. My personal experience with paid surveys.
Ok, Readers, what have you comes across that you have found to be legit? What are your experiences?

+Dedicated to Financial Freedom has a post on Opinion Outpost

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