I’ve discussed before about how I started my Vanguard Snowball with existing funds in my brokerage account, but I started to notice that the weekly paying funds I wanted to test out were very difficult to buy inside of Vanguard. It’s not designed for trading. So I opened up, or I should say, reactivated my Robinhood account. Robinhood lets you sign up via referral links from your friends, or reddit, and get a free stock for each of the accounts. In the transparency of this Blog, my referral link is below.

In 2017 my office did a round robin sharing of our referral links. I got Sirius XM (SIRI) and VEREIT (VER). I promptly sold them and scooped my $11 off to something else. Now starting December 1st 2025, I have been funding my Robinhood account with a focus on weekly paying dividend funds. I’ll list those in the next post. These are extremely high risk, but my thought process was that my funding money was very limited so anything that could cashflow me into more funds faster was what I wanted to invest in.

How was I finding the money, that I couldn’t set aside to invest while paying bills and paying off debt? I started with an App last year called “Playful Rewards” they were new and shiny and had some crazy offers where every time you completed a goal you could watch an ad and DOUBLE your reward. I spent around a month playing 1 or 2 games and hit a total of $810 in rewards. That was great until I needed to cash out. Then it was ghosting and account bans and nothing but trouble. Eventually after sending enough emails and screenshots to random people at their company who I could find via google and LinkedIn I was able to get cashed out successfully. I had spent $150 on purchases for rewards and got my entire $810 balance paid out to me for a profit of $660!

Clearly they weren’t the right app, too new, too shady. I went down the rabbit hole and found Swagbucks. Years of legitimacy, known good support, and functioning payouts. Swagbucks also does referrals that allow you to both gain extra points, and 100 points equals $1. Feel free to use my referral:

I was able to get around $100 out of swagbucks in the spring before my year got too busy to keep working on it.

That changed this Thanksgiving when I started planning this snowball. I was running lean on Christmas shopping and went back to the app. $425 in cashed out winnings so far with $200 spent, but one of the games was a cash solitaire game and $60 cashed out there so spending was actually $140. That’s almost 70% profit! These payouts will continue to help snowball my dividend funds, but the surveys and game apps are not passive income they are very active time sinks.

~~Miniwing~~