Alternative Income

This has some overlap with bank bonuses but deserves to be considered seperately. There are many programs that will pay you to refer new customers to them. Last month I made over $300 in referral bonuses. That was one of my better months but I should make over $200 this month as well. Unless another new referral program comes up I’ll probably be back under $100 next month but this is good money for the amount of work involved.

I have various referral bonus programs on my Make $$$ With TFM page. My most consistent performer has been ING DIRECT. I exhausted my original 25 Orange Savings referrals and then exhausted the additional 25 they gave me as well resulting in $500 for me. Now I’m making my mom money by sending her Orange Savings referrals. I still have Electric Orange referrals but there isn’t much demand for them. If you’re interested in any of the bonuses just send your info via the contact form on the Make $$$ With TFM page. If you have any questions email me or leave a comment.

It has been a while since I’ve posted about any alternative income streams. There is a new service called Brring! that allows you to get paid when your friends call. You play them a 10 second ad before the call forwards to you. Basically you set up a phone number with Brring! that forwards to your actual phone number but first plays the ad. You get paid $0.05 per call but right now they are paying $1.00 each for the first ten calls.

I’ve just signed up for the service so I can’t vouch for how well it works yet. Even though I’m a Tight Fisted Miser I consider it a little tacky to try to make money off my friends calling me. I plan to use this number for anybody other than friends and work. It will be nice to make some money off the telemarketers for a change. They are also paying $1.00 for each referral you invite. I’m going to give this service a try and if it doesn’t work than I’ll just stop using the number. If you’d like to try it you can sign up by clicking on the banner below.

I get paid for doing searches through Moola.com.  This doesn’t add up to much so don’t expect it to be a significant source of income.  I’ve made a little over $20 so far this year.  It doesn’t take much time to do the search when I’m online anyway.  The search results aren’t as good as Google but they are reasonable.  I had a membership with Slashmysearch also but I earned even less with them and they had spammy search results so I decided to use Moola only.  Moola also has several games you can play against others to try to win money.  If you would like an invitation to Moola I have three available.

This is another way to make some extra money. Banks often offer cash bonuses for opening a free checking account. I opened a free checking account last month at a local bank and received a $50 bonus. It only took about twenty minutes so I consider it well worth the effort. You can also receive bonuses for signing up for new credit cards and some services. Just make sure that you don’t end up spending more than the bonus. Read the details carefully to make sure the bonus is as good as it seems.
Another example of a bonus I received is the $150 bonus I received for signing up for the Sony card in January. It also came with a 0% balance transfer offer which I used and put into a savings account at Emigrant Direct earning me another roughly $20 a month.

If you are interested in bank bonuses a good place to find them is my other blog Bank Bonuses. You can also find information on bank bonuses and a variety of other types of bonuses at FatWallet and Slickdeals.

My alternative income total for June was $543.68. This is my best total ever but it is not sustainble right now. There were several sources of income that will not be repeated or at least won’t all be repeated in the same month. I estimate I could live on about $1000 a month without job related expenses,dental bills, and debt repayment. It will be a while before all those are eliminated so a more realistic total for monthly living expenses would be $1500. That means I’m about a third of the way there. Right now I plan to keep working even if I do get my alternative income to the level where it pays my monthly expenses. It would still be nice to know that I could pay my bills even if I were to quit my job or for some reason be unable to work.