Often times, it’s small changes that you can incorporate to your current behaviors that can start to make a demonstrable positive impact on your financial approach (and overall wealth) over time. The topic for this post certainly falls into that category. However, more than the hundreds or thousands of dollars that you can save, I believe that the mindset that you start to develop as you nurture your money muscle is even more critical to your long term financial success.
The topic I want to share with you today is about using click-through sites or online rebates to get back a percentage of the money that you spend online. Chances are that you are already spending money online. According to optinmonster.com, 69% of people shop online with the average shopper spending over $1800 per year. If you were able to get a modest 5% rebate on that spending, the average person would get $90 per year back in rebates.
Is that going to be life changing? Absolutely not. Would that get you a couple of dinners or allow you to do something a little extra fun while on vacation? It probably would. More importantly, as you start to think about how you spend your money wisely, the more natural it becomes. That’s one of the biggest practices that we preach at Spend This, Not That.
So how does it work?
Many online shopping sites give referral fees to other sites for promoting their products or stores. While browsing on another site, blog, or webpage, they may have links to certain products or stores within the page that you are viewing. While you click through that link versus browsing directly to the target site, that visit is tracked — as is the referral information. If you buy something when you land on the new site, the referrer will often get a small payment based on the purchase you made.
While the majority of pages that direct traffic don’t share these referral fees with you — the person who is actually spending money — some do.
There are also some great sign up bonuses I’ll outline below that will net you an additional $60 as well.
Where can I go to start getting my money back?
Turning referral links into a business has been around for awhile, so there are quite a few similar sites that now offer this capability. However, the percentage of money that you get back will vary — sometimes drastically — between different sites.
Occasionally, they even offer incentives if you choose particular method to receive your earnings. For example, I recently got an additional 5% bonus for choosing a virtual Visa gift card. I’d then use that virtual card when I didn’t have a better rewards option than my Fidelity Rewards Visa (which is 2% everywhere).
I’ve looked through major options and have found that one or two sites almost always have the best rates. More often than not, TopCashBack is true to its namesake and does offer the highest rates. Through the end of 2020, I’ve earned over $1100 cashback through TopCashback. If you sign up through the link above, you’ll also get $20 just for signing up.
You could probably stick with TopCashBack and do extremely well, but if you want to squeeze out every possible quarter, you might also want to sign up for Rakuten (formerly eBates). If you sign up through this link, you can get a $40 sign up bonus right now. Sometimes Rakuten has better rates or promotions that make it worth checking a second site on bigger purchases.
I mentioned in my grocery saving post that Ibotta offers cash back for online purchases as well, but I’ve found their rates to be slightly lower.
Are there ways to make this easier?
I’m not a big fan of installing too many browser plugings, but the TopCashBack plugin is one that makes the cut. When you’re on a site where cashback is available, the TopCashBack hummingbird will come alive and all you need to do is click it to activate cashback on that site. Make your purchase as you normally do, and you’ll get a portion of your purchase back.
One last point to mention is that these cashback sites can stack with other rewards. You can still use coupons and earn credit card rewards as well. If you were able to get 5% from your credit card and 5% through TopCashBack, now all of the sudden you are making a sizeable dent in your purchase.
So what are you waiting for? If you’re spending money online today, you have no excuse not to sign up. This is definitely not a way to get rich, but it is a great way to save some money, spend wisely, and help you to think about how you spend money. Give it a try and let me know what you think.