Sign Up for Swagbucks and Win at Life

I recently decided to partner with one of my favorite make-money-online sites--Swagbucks! I am now a Swagbucks Influencer. All that means is if you sign up within the next week you benefit from a special code, and that I might mention it around this blog if they're doing something cool.

And guess what? They're doing something cool right now.

I know I've talked about Swagbucks before, and it's pretty awesome especially in regard to making gift cards. Specifically Amazon gift cards, although they have other ones available. (I actually bought half our Christmas gifts last year, worth over $100, with Amazon gift cards earned through Swagbucks.) Well now I have exciting news and a great opportunity for all of you to earn bonus SB -- enough to get a free $5 gift card!  

Anyone who signs up for Swagbucks.com through my link here between now and June 30th is eligible to get a 500 SB bonus! Click on the part that says "I have a sign up code" and enter WINDMILLS for an instant 70 Swagbucks! (Code expires June 13 so get to gettin' already.)

In order to get the bonus automatically*, you must also earn 1500 SB by July 14th. Note that since this is an exclusive offer, you must sign up through this link and earn 1500 SB in order to get your 500 SB bonus. If you sign up elsewhere, or only do one of the two steps, the bonus unfortunately will not be available to you.  

So how do you get that 500 SB bonus? Simple: you can earn SB from any of the earning activities found on the homepage or top bar of Swagbucks.com (Shop, Search, Watch, Play, Answer, Discover, Daily Crave, NOSO & Daily Poll).  In the meantime, if you haven't started earning with Swagbucks yet, now is a great time to sign up and check out all the different ways to earn Bucks -- all so you can get a bunch of free gift cards.  

One of the best ways I have found to earn SB is by downloading the SBTV Mobile App (on Android, iPhone, and even on Kindle!) and running the videos on there. You can get up to 50 SB per day from that, and it can be pretty passive. (Check out the 10 Second Tip videos in the Home and Garden section--favorite them by dragging to the left.) So if you just do that every day, you will have your 1500 SB in 30 days! $5 Amazon cards cost 450 SB, so after the bonus, you will have made at least $20 without ever leaving your couch.


Too much words? Here's the tl;dr step-by-step version:
1. Sign up for Swagbucks using this link here and use the code WINDMILLS (through 6/13) for a free 70 SB.
2. Earn 1500 SB by July 14th. Download SBTV Mobile app to earn 50 per day. Multiply by 30. Boom, 1500.
3. ??? (Do other awesome Swagbucks-y tasks.)
4. Profit! 500 extra SB thrown into your lap.

* Please note that it may take up to 14 business days to credit your account once you have earned 1500 SB. 

Why I Brag About My Cell Phone Bill (And How You Can Too)

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. I was not paid to write it, and all opinions are my own.

I'm probably turning into a broken record, but when something awesome happens, I just have to brag.

Remember how I decided to join the 21st century and delve into smartphone-land??

Well, I did a TON of research. All online during naptime, of course. I knew I wanted a no-contract plan. I learned that if you don't always want the latest and greatest phone, then that's the way to go. Contract plans give you free or discounted phones, but the price of them is just being rolled into your plan. I've had the same dumbphone for 4 years (the background picture on it is one I took of B when we were engaged--that was 2009), so I'm quite obviously not a latest-and-greatest addict. The no-contract plans that run on Sprint's network (Sprint MVNOs, the technical term) seemed to be the best bang for the buck and most were rated quite highly. Just as I was about to pull the trigger and join Virgin Mobile, an internet stranger on a forum pushed me toward Ting.

Smart, smart, smart internet stranger. I had a learning curve to all this, but he explained it all and even gave suggestions of which phone I should get and how buy a Ting-compatible one on Ebay. (It was actually rather simple.)

I settled on the Samsung Galaxy S3. Ting sells devices, but it's kind of expensive, Instead, I bought a refurb (with a warranty! and chargers!) on Ebay for $175. I know this phone is a freebie on most of the contract plans when you sign up, but it basically gets rolled into your heavy phone bill.

$175/24 months (the length of most contracts) = $7.29 per month (keep this number in mind)

My new pride and joy, complete with purple otterbox

Setting it up with Ting was super duper simple. They don't have any physical stores so it's all online. I haven't had to call their customer service yet, but everyone online raves that a live American person picks up after a few rings. I even got a new phone number since I was tired of having a number that belonged to the area I haven't lived in since 2006.

The thing with Ting that scares a lot of people is that you pay per usage. Not what you think your usage will be, but what it actually is at the end of the month. My bill for my first month with my first smartphone on Ting was . . .

 . . .

wait for it . . .

$24.45

Don't believe me? Well, here's my actual bill with usage price plus fees.

Yes, that includes all the wacky taxes and fees. So add my $7.29 (monthly cost of my phone) to that, and it was $31.74 for the full cost of my phone for my first month.

Also, I said above that this plan works on Sprint's network (so I had to get a Sprint phone, which was no big deal.) What I didn't say was that this plan also roams onto Verizon's voice network. At no extra cost! This is one of the main reasons I chose Ting over Virgin Mobile.

That means you're covered by 2 of the nation's largest networks when making a real live phone call. I put this to the test shortly after I got it. My in-law's house has notoriously bad reception with Sprint--my BIL says he has had to walk down to the end of the driveway (which is a looooong  one) to take a phone call. It's winter in Indiana, so that was just not an option I wanted to entertain. But then a few hours later, there I was happily chatting away on the phone with my mom while in my in-laws' kitchen, nary a care in the world about crappy reception.

My husband B decided to join in on this after an unfortunate work-iPhone-in-the-toilet incident that left him phone-less for a bit, and now we have 2 devices on our plan. He also bought the same phone off of Ebay, and our bill this month look like this:

Like all wonderful things, there are definitely a few drawbacks to Ting. The first one is that with multiple devices, you still get charged for each person's use (as far as I can tell). So if B calls me and we talk for 20 minutes, we get charged for 40 (there's no differentiation between incoming/outgoing in the billing). Same with texting.

Also, if you're a super-de-dooper heavy user in any category (2GB, 4800 texts, 2100 minutes), Ting is probably not for you. Here's the rate table:

I highlighted what we used last month, so the figure at the bottom is our total.

Although I just did the math on heavy users and it's not bad. $15 for 1GB, 25¢ for 100 extra texts, and $1.90 for 100 minutes.

I've been surprised by how many megabytes we DON'T use. Since I'd never had a smartphone, I had trouble gauging what my data usage would be. Well, it turns out that almost everywhere I go has wi-fi. And with the winter being the way it has been, I haven't exactly been sitting on park benches checking Twitter. B even showed me an easy way to disable data on my phone so it isn't constantly searching if it loses the wi-fi signal. When I know I'm not near wi-fi and need data, I just go to my settings and turn it back on. In 2 clicks, I have 4G LTE speed data. This simple trick dropped me from 97MB in the first month to a whopping 8MB in the second.

Ting's website has a handy-dandy savings calculator, if you want to see how much you could save.

Some other cool things about Ting is that there is a referral program, so if you use my link, you'll get a $25 credit, and I get a kickback, too, of course. (So, yes, my first month was actually FREE, thanks to the that!) I'd probably still be writing this post even without the kickback, since I heart frugality and I'd call this one of my better decisions. And if you want to get out of your contract and switch to Ting, they offer up to $75 to help with that. Ting also is easy to use and you can cap your amounts in each category or just set up alerts. I can check my usage any time on the app on my phone.

So, I'm obviously very, very happy with Ting! Other low-cost plans that I seriously considered were Virgin Mobile and Republic Wireless, so those might be a better fit for you. Reddit's NoContract forum was a big help. New plans seem to crop up overnight, so I'm sure I'll lose touch eventually, but for now, I'm happy that I finally joined smartphone-land/the 21st century without breaking the bank.

Guest Post at Messy Wife, Blessed Life: Library Love

Mandi has a great series called Baby on a Budget over at her blog Messy Wife, Blessed Life. Considering I used to teach a class entitled "Budget for Baby," contributing to this series was a no-brainer. Others have posted about some of the 'big' topics we covered in my class, so I decided to post about a smaller, but always-frugal decision: utilizing your public library. (I'm actually writing this up right now instead of going to our usual library story hour because I don't feel like digging the car out of the snow this morning.)

Here's a sneak peek of the post:

While you can go the traditional routes to saving money as a parent (which I certainly do)--couponing, deal-hunting, cloth diapering, et cetera--there are some other less obvious ways to stretch your dollar and bump up your family's quality of life.  Yes, today I will be sharing about the awesomeness of the public library . . . continue reading more at Messy Wife, Blessed Life

If you have found your way over here for the first time, welcome! Mandi likes to harp on the fact that I've won a lot of cool stuff. Check out the most recent awesome win of mine (it's probably my best win so far). Hang around for a bit because soon I will be posting some of my own personal tips for winning giveaways!

What Would You Do?

What would you do if you won $5,000?

Now what if you had to use all of that money to help others?

And what if all of it had to go toward helping teachers in public schools?

I ask this not because I'm really all that keen to hear your answers (sorry), but because it happened. To me. Yes, thanks to Bing Rewards I won FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS, all of which had to be spent on DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose.org is a website where public school teachers can post projects and request materials for their classrooms and anyone can donate to them. I had found this site a year or two ago, and my sister who teaches second grade at high poverty school back in Georgia has posted a few projects, which have been funded in various ways. When I won this, I was so excited to call her up, and I told her to post a few more!

I apparently only had a limited time to use the money, or else DonorsChoose would pick random projects to fund. I posted on Facebook to see if my friends had projects. I gave to friends, friends of friends, people on  internet message boards, and a handful of completely random strangers. I went through all the places I've lived before and picked projects to fund in each. There were none listed for any schools I have actually attended, so I picked some others in my hometown. And then I gave my sister-in-law very large gift card for the site at Christmas. I think she got an iPad for the Special Ed. kids she teaches, and I'm sure it will be a great tool for them.

For most of the projects, I gave as "Anonymous Donor," and I'm pretty sure the recipients saw me as:

But I felt more like:

I've won some cool stuff in the past, even blogged about one of the best ones here, but I think this one tops them all. It was so fun helping all of those classrooms!