Tag: spend this not that

Don’t Leave Money on the Table When Shopping Online

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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).

Ratukuten Earnings

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.

Save Money on Groceries with Ibotta

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A free Thanksgiving Dinner. Yes, that’s right. In the crazy year that is 2020, I’m getting a free turkey roast, green beans, French’s Onions, gravy mix, a 2 liter of Coke, potatoes, stuffing, cream of mushroom soup, and cranberry sauce for FREE! This is definitely not the first time that I’ve received the entire amount spent on groceries back, and I suspect that it won’t be my last.

I don’t use Ibotta all the time, but over the last couple of years, I have scored some really great deals, had the opportunity to try some new products, and saved over $340. If you don’t already have an account, you can use my referral link, and I’ll be very grateful. That also means that you’ll be in my Ibotta team which can allow you to earn extra bonuses if we both redeem a certain number of offers.

When I first started using Ibotta, it was solely focused on groceries, but it has since expanded into other areas. One of the biggest expansion areas is click-through cashback, but I’ve found their payback ratios are not quite as good as Top Cashback (which is a topic for another post) — so I digress.

The place where I find that Ibotta is worth the time is where they started — in the grocery store. Ibotta came up with a model to bring grocery store coupons into the 21st century. Rather than include coupons in a Sunday newspaper that very few people actually subscribe to any more, manufacturers or stores can offer digital coupons through the Ibotta app.

Once you install the app on your phone, you can browse by store or search for particular items to see what the current deals are. Most offers are added with a single click, though some others do require that you play an ad or click through a survey. In general though, it’s very non-invasive.

Then you go grocery shopping. You find the items that are on your list and can even scan the barcodes in the store to make sure that you’re getting the right item. That can be an important step because most offers are for a specific size or variety of the item. Scanning the item as you shop also potentially saves you a step down the line.

There are also often “Any Item” offers. These can be extremely broad and can literally be any item, or can be in a specific category like any tomato or any box of cereal. When you find everything that you wanted, you pay for your groceries just as you normally would.

The next piece has changed a bit over time. Originally, you always had to scan your receipt after checkout and scan the barcodes of any items that you hadn’t checked in the store. For some stores, that’s still what you need to do. You’ll identify the offers that you used and and submit your receipt. The app will show you the money that you’ll be getting back.

However, for specific stores, you can link your loyalty reward account or scan a barcode on the receipt to save a few steps.  In either of those cases, Ibotta then validates that you actually bought the items that you said you did. They use your barcode scans and the copy of your receipt to do so.

The one last tip I have is to look for the bonuses that pop up from time to time. They occasionally have incentives for redeeming a certain number of offers over a weekend, around a holiday, or even in a month. These bonus offers stack with the standard offers so they can really add up quickly. Oftentimes, with a good bonus offer, you can get almost everything you buy for free.

And really that’s it! Once your offers have been validated, the money will show up in your Ibotta account. You can transfer it to your bank, send it to Paypal, or use it to get digital gift cards — some of which even come with a bonus value.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Ibotta today. This is definitely an area where you can stretch your dollars by spending this, not that.

Automatically Tracking Your Money is Critical

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There’s an implicit (and sometimes even explicit) rule that drives almost every single decision that we take when thinking about money: Spend less than you earn. If you are spending more than you earn — with my only current exception being if you are a student in college — you will not be financially successful. 

While that simple phase is both completely true and is easy to say, I know that it can be much harder to do. There are two critically important pieces of information that you need in order to know whether you are on track for this fundamental rule.

  • How much are you spending?
  • How much do you earn?

Much to the agony of my wife, I track nearly every single dollar that we earn and that we spend. Having good data to reference has been incredibly useful for everything from taxes, saving for college, tracking progress against another long term goal like buying a house, or being able to set a (rough) budget.

My dad used to keep all of his receipts and record the amount that they spent on a paper ledger.  Obviously, there have been some major advances in technology since then, but they are only helpful if you put them to use. The secret that is mentioned in the title is that if this process is really going to scale and be something that you can keep in place for the long haul, it has to be automatic (or at least pretty close).

In 2008, I signed up for an account on a new site that promised to make tracking your finances easy, automatic, and secure. That site was mint.com. Nearly 13 years later, I can’t imagine being able to keep up with everything without it.

Mint removes the majority of the tedious work required to track your income and expenses if you let it. That last part is important because Mint can obviously only get access to the accounts that you let it. If you only grant access to a small subset of your accounts, you will not be able to see your full financial picture. I personally started with my main credit card, but then soon after added the remainder of my accounts since I was seeing so much value of the aggregated data.

When you connect and authorize Mint to connect to a new bank, it will automatically download as many transactions as are available. Then, based on the transaction information provided, it will attempt to categorize as many of those as possible into a broad set of groups and categories. You can continue to use those predefined categories or you can add additional custom ones should you choose.

I’ve kept the additional categories to a minimum which has been a recommendation I would extend to you as well. You’ll minimize any manual re-categorization that you need to do by limiting those custom additions. I personally typically check the categories on charges when I review everything for any fraudulent transactions, but the fact that all my transactions are in one place means that it’s a quick occasional task to do so.

Now that you have your categorized data, you can start to glean all sorts of information from it. The budgeting process definitely deserves its own post, but without even getting into those details you can start to see the value. One of Mint’s automated insights tracks your cash flow for the month (and historically). This single stat allows you to see in an instant whether or not you followed my golden rule of personal finance.

Did you spend less than you earn? I sure hope that you did, but if you didn’t, don’t be disheartened. Now that you have this information (either way), you can start to make the changes needed to improve your financial future. Find the other spending hacks here on Spend This, Not That that resonate with you. Develop and nurture your money mindfulness. Every person’s financial journey is different, but being cognizant of the whole picture is critical to your success — and if you will be successful if you do.