Good Deals

Easy Money from Staples Gift Card Deal

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Until 3-21-15 Staples is offering a $20 rebate in the form of a Visa gift card when you buy $250 or more of Visa gift cards. The purchase fee for a $200 gift card is $6.95. If you buy 2 $200 gift cards you will have a profit of $6.10. That doesn’t sound like much but when  you combine it with the credit card rewards you can get for purchasing the cards it is a good deal. I know at least one of my readers has a Chase Ink card that pays 5x at Staples which would mean they would get 2000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points in addition to the $6.10. I only have a 2% cash back card so my profit will be $14.10. That is a pretty good deal for just a few minutes of my time to buy the cards and submit the rebate.  In addition to making a little money this is also helpful if you need to meet a minimum spend requirement to get a credit card bonus. There is a limit of one rebate per household for this deal.

Next week, 3-22-15 to 3-28-15, Staples is offering a $20 rebate in the form of a Staples gift card when you buy $250 or more of Mastercard gift cards. The math for this deal works the same.  The big difference in this deal is that the rebate is for a Staples gift card which can only be used at Staples rather than for a Visa gift card which can be used anywhere that accepts Visa. This isn’t a big deal to me since I buy stuff at Staples on a regular basis.  I’m in Staples at least once a month to get free stuff from recycling ink and they frequently have free after rebate items so using the Staples gift card will not be a problem.

Marathon Musings and Super Sales

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Can a 50 pounds overweight, 43 year old guy run a marathon with just two months of  lackluster training? Yes.  Should he? No!!

I did manage to finish the Bass Pro Marathon last Sunday with a time of 6:06:41 which placed me at 155 of 158 men in the marathon.  Hey, I wasn’t last and anyway my main goal was to finish.  I’ve now completed 5 marathons in 5 different states.   This marathon was tough.  I spent most of the last 10 miles walking rather than running.  The temperature was in the 40s when the race started but it was near 70 and sunny for the last half of the race.  This made it uncomfortably hot for me and I became a little dehydrated.  I also got a little sunburn and chapped lips.  Of course there were sore muscles after the race but they recovered after a couple of days.  This was the first time the muscles in my arms became sore as well.  I guess it was just from holding them up in a running position for most of the race.  I won’t be doing any more marathons until I lose some significant weight and am in much better shape.

I’ll post some marathon photos later.  I’ve managed to jack up the SD card slot in my laptop by accidentally putting the little protector piece of plastic in there sideways.  As soon the USB card reader I ordered arrives I’ll upload some of the marathon photos.

If you are looking to do some early Christmas shopping here are some good deals.

The Mr. Rebates Christmas Promo offers increased cash back at over 300 stores with some offering up to 22% cash back.

Mr. Rebates also offers a $5 sign up bonus for new members.

Best Cash Back Shopping Sites

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Cash Back shopping sites such as Ebates, Big Crumbs, and Mr. Rebates get paid for sending customers to online merchants. They then share some of that cash with the customers who went through their shopping site to make the purchase. It is a simple process. You log in to the cash back site of your choice and then click through to the online merchant where you want to make a purchase. After you check out you will get a percentage of the purchase price back in your cash back account. These percentages are usually 1% – 7% but they can be even higher.

The cash back shopping sites I prefer are:

Ebates –   They currently offer a $5 sign up bonus and have one of the largest selection of merchants to choose from.

Mr. Rebates – They also offer a $5 sign up bonus.  They have the best cash back percentage for a lot of merchants.

Big Crumbs –  They do not currently offer a bonus but they do have a large amount of merchants to choose from and competitive cash back percentages.  You can also check out the BigCrumbs Deals page for great deals that are added on top of the cash back.

Once you sign up for any of these cash back shopping sites you can earn money for referring new users just like I do. Not only can you save a little money on your online purchases you can make a little money as well.

Search and Win Gift Card with Swag Bucks

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Swag Bucks is an online portal dedicated to helping you earn digital dollars called “Swag Bucks”, which can be redeemed for exclusive swagbucks.com merchandise. There is a variety of merchandise but gift cards are what I’m most likely to use my Swag Bucks for. You can get a $5 Amazon.com gift card for 45 Swag Bucks which seems to be one of the better deals. It takes a different number of Swag Bucks to earn a same denomination gift card depending on the retailer.

This is somewhat similar to the Moola.com search and win that I used to participate in before they ended it. The Moola deal was good while it lasted and I’ve made a couple bucks this month from my referrals participating in the deals they still have. I’ve just started Swag Bucks and I’m hoping it will work at least as well as Moola for me. It does have the recommendation of other bloggers I read.

The best way to benefit from a program like this is to have referrals because you also earn points when your referrals earn points. If you would like to give this a try just sign up using my Swag Bucks referral link.

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May Expenses

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses in May.

Household

$392.78

Utilities

$90.95

Transportation

$242.35

Food

$68.43

Entertainment

$75.79

Student Loan Debt

$97.00

Total

$967.30

I finally got my expenses back down under the $1000 mark. Expenses should be pretty much the same in June. I do make a 3 hour drive twice a week now which might increase my gas costs but I’m driving less during the week which will offset most of that. My car has to be registered and inspected this month also so my transportation cost might go up a little. My entertainment cost also might go up slightly since I was able to take advantage of more free entertainment in May than I think I’ll be able to do this month. Overall it should be a low cost month though.