Yesterday I went over some of the extra side hustle income made in March. I mentioned a few apps and websites that I haven’t talked about in the past and I felt this is probably a good time to discuss them.

I try to not advocate for a method until I’ve successfully received a payout as some of these apps can be shady. Branded Surveys [My Referral Link] is a pretty solid survey site. I get rejected a lot less than on Swagbucks surveys. They also have some deals related to games and other things. My biggest points rewards from them have been in their “limited time” bonus rewards. Most of these are things like: Sign up for a recurring monthly contribution to this charity at $20 per month and get $40 in points. Last month, I earned $188 spending $70. Three charities I donated $20 each and got $40 in Branded rewards. MGM sports betting needed me to deposit $10 and place 1 bet. I did a like -4000 point bet (a mostly sure win) with $1 got my $48 Branded bonus and cashed $10.14 out of the MGM app. The last one was $10 for SoFi Plus subscription that paid $20 in Branded money. So I was out $70 to gain $188. With Survey points we cashed out $200, or $130 in profit.

FreeCash [My Referral Link] is another phone app competitor to Swagbucks. They limit which game deals you can see but they appear to have decently high payouts…if you can meet the timed milestones. The issue I have with them is two fold. One, some of their rewards decrease over time even if you are making the timer to reach the reward.

Two, their paypal payouts have a $5 transaction fee. Now they did offer a pretty interesting deal. Transfer all your cash out to Stake (a gambling site) and get 30% more money. Stake was able to cash me out in crypto straight to my Robinhood wallet that I immediately sold and bought the stocks I was going to buy anyway. All for roughly 42 extra free bucks. The downside was that, like many of these pay for games apps, I had to spend around $75 meeting the higher payout goals. Generally if I feel I can meet a goal for more money I’m ok spending about 50% of a payout. With the extra $42 it helped that ratio a bunch. Total: $184 paid out. $77.77 spent. $106.23 profit.

My next March side hustle was SoFi Checking account [My Referral Link] which was done through Swagbucks [Best Referral Link]. Swagbucks said new SoFi Checking customers could get $415. $15 for sign-up, $400 after a direct deposit of $400 or more. SoFi was allowing this to stack with $300 in a bonus from them if you could deposit $5,000 or more over a certain window of time. 30 days for first deposit, 25 days after first deposit for all other deposits. These have to be from an employer source. There are several suggestions on the internet of what qualifies. Unfortunately the $400 from Swagbucks didn’t credit early enough for me to count it in the March end of month, but still that was $300 from SoFi, $415 from Swagbucks. Costing me $5 in payroll transaction fees. So $710 profit.

My wife was also able to use my Chime referral, [Referral Link Here], to get us both bonuses from Chime. $100 for her getting a direct deposit. $200 for me as the referrer. I had $2.50 in payroll transaction fees, placing the profit at $297.50.

Last but not least was me churning a Chase Credit Card. This time a $750 bonus for spending $6,000. If you recall from my unexpected bills article, beginning of the year medical expenses and property taxes were a rather large hit against my wallet. The bright side is that I was able to pay many of them with this card locking in the $750 bonus. Which is still pending and couldn’t make it into the March count. Between the bonus points and the spending points that card totaled: $840. Only $100 of which was cashed out in March.

That puts our Profit from side hustling the last month at $2,083.73.

~~Miniwing~~
Hustler, Stoic, Investor