ReceiptHog is an app that you can submit your receipts to earn points that can be redeemed for Amazon gift cards or cash via PayPal. It takes awhile to earn enough points to cash out, but it doesn't take much effort and certainly gives a good boost to the grocery budget when you are able to redeem for $30 (about every four to six months for us).
You used to only be able to submit grocery receipts, but you can now submit pretty much any kind of receipt. However, not all receipts earn you coins. Mainly places where you buy groceries such as supermarkets, convenience stores, pet stores, dollar stores, etc. are ones that earn you coins. The amount of coins you earn varies based on how much you spend (max 20 receipts or 275 points a week). Other stores like for clothing can be submitted to earn you spins. All receipts also give you an entry in the monthly sweepstakes.
Spins are earned from certain receipts that don't qualify for coins. They are also earned when you submit at least one receipt a week for a certain amount of weeks each month. If you're lucky you can win a lot of coins from the spins, but I find I rarely win and when I do I get like 2 coins, so really the spins contribute very little to being reaching 4500 to redeem for $30.
Overall I find ReceiptHog a useful app for not only having records of purchases, but earning some extra money for groceries. It does have options lower than $30 to cash out, but you get way more for your coins if you wait until you can redeem for $30. For example, $5 costs 1,000 coins, but instead of costing 6,000 for $30, it only costs 4,500. Also, it's the same value whether you choose to get Amazon or Paypal. I always go with Paypal because then I can use it wherever we want to get groceries including buying an Amazon card on Dlyte if needed for our every other month Amazon Subscribe & Save order.
Showing posts with label Boosting Our Grocery Budget. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boosting Our Grocery Budget. Show all posts
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Friday, March 4, 2016
Using SavingStar to Boost Our Grocery Budget
SavingStar is mainly an app to earn cashback when you buy the items featured in their grocery offers. I did recently realize that they also have a way to earn cashback for online shopping, but there are only a few places and the only one I imagine myself using anytime would be American Airlines. While I haven't used the online shopping part of SavingStar before, if you do use those places it seems to offer one of the best percentages cashback for those places.
Depending on the store, to get cashback you either link your loyalty card or upload the receipt. The only linked card I've used is for CVS and the cashback is usually in my account within 48 hours. They do sometimes take awhile to process receipts, but I've never had an issue with getting credit even when it's processed after the offer expires as long as I submit before the offer expires.
The grocery offers in SavingStar typically include one healthy offer a week, various product offers that mostly update at the beginning of the month, and some one or many brand offers. They used to have a freebie offer almost every weekend, but it now seems to be only once a month if at all. I think the healthy offers have also been missing some weeks, but most recently they seem to be back to every week (they change on Tuesdays).
The healthy offers vary to sometimes be vegetables and sometimes fruit. We rarely take advantage of these because they tend not to be things we use or something else is on sale that makes it more worthwhile to get that instead.
The regular offers are the ones we use the most. Almost every month they have some Yoplait, General Mills, and Pillsbury offers. Our favorite are the Pillsbury ones as almost every month we manage to get some crescent rolls for pretty much free when we match a sale with a newspaper or printed coupon and then redeem the offer on SavingStar.
Sometimes the One or Many offers are useful, although a lot of times they just aren't worth it for us. This is partly because they are things we don't buy, but also it seems to be that the brands they are for end up not being the ones on sale during that offer period. A lot of times we only end up halfway to them and I rarely buy stuff to finish it off unless it's a good deal on those items anyways. They really can make the products an okay deal on their own though as it does tend to be a good amount back such as $3 when you spend $12 or $4 to $5 when you spend $20.
My main problem with the One or Many offers, though, is that they rarely seem to process the receipt to give you the exact credit of what you spent. Sometimes it ends up being more than what you paid, but sometimes it ends up giving you credit for less than what you paid and I just don't care to even try to contact them so I have no idea if they have good customer service to fix if you try or not.
Overall SavingStar is probably my favorite of the cashback apps. The amount of offers does tend to be limited, but there are consistently ones on things we buy anyways. Also, it's nice that the cashout minimum is $5, which is why it's my favorite ever since Ibotta went to a $20 minimum.
Depending on the store, to get cashback you either link your loyalty card or upload the receipt. The only linked card I've used is for CVS and the cashback is usually in my account within 48 hours. They do sometimes take awhile to process receipts, but I've never had an issue with getting credit even when it's processed after the offer expires as long as I submit before the offer expires.
The grocery offers in SavingStar typically include one healthy offer a week, various product offers that mostly update at the beginning of the month, and some one or many brand offers. They used to have a freebie offer almost every weekend, but it now seems to be only once a month if at all. I think the healthy offers have also been missing some weeks, but most recently they seem to be back to every week (they change on Tuesdays).
The healthy offers vary to sometimes be vegetables and sometimes fruit. We rarely take advantage of these because they tend not to be things we use or something else is on sale that makes it more worthwhile to get that instead.
The regular offers are the ones we use the most. Almost every month they have some Yoplait, General Mills, and Pillsbury offers. Our favorite are the Pillsbury ones as almost every month we manage to get some crescent rolls for pretty much free when we match a sale with a newspaper or printed coupon and then redeem the offer on SavingStar.
Sometimes the One or Many offers are useful, although a lot of times they just aren't worth it for us. This is partly because they are things we don't buy, but also it seems to be that the brands they are for end up not being the ones on sale during that offer period. A lot of times we only end up halfway to them and I rarely buy stuff to finish it off unless it's a good deal on those items anyways. They really can make the products an okay deal on their own though as it does tend to be a good amount back such as $3 when you spend $12 or $4 to $5 when you spend $20.
My main problem with the One or Many offers, though, is that they rarely seem to process the receipt to give you the exact credit of what you spent. Sometimes it ends up being more than what you paid, but sometimes it ends up giving you credit for less than what you paid and I just don't care to even try to contact them so I have no idea if they have good customer service to fix if you try or not.
Overall SavingStar is probably my favorite of the cashback apps. The amount of offers does tend to be limited, but there are consistently ones on things we buy anyways. Also, it's nice that the cashout minimum is $5, which is why it's my favorite ever since Ibotta went to a $20 minimum.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Using Ibotta to Boost Our Grocery Budget
Ibotta is app that you can earn cash back on qualifying items. The offers vary from store to store and new offers seem to be added pretty regularly. Most of the offers are for groceries, but there are also some for things like electronics, apparel, and restaurants. To earn the cash back/rebates, you usually have to scan the product barcode and then submit photos of the receipt. You can withdraw your earnings starting at $20 for Paypal and $25 for gift cards including Amazon.
I have been using Ibotta since November 2012 and over the years I have found the offers to have mostly improved in variety that interest me and being worthwhile to take advantage of. However, since you now have to wait until $20 to cash out, I just use it as a nice bonus instead of counting on it when making my grocery list that week be under $50 when it used to be $5 and I could cash out more
frequently.
Overall I find Ibotta useful for helping add some variety and trying new things as it often has rebate for new products, which tend to also be on sale and/or have other coupons available when they come out. The Any Brand rebates are also great for stocking up things we tend to end up using anyways, such as there's regularly a $0.25 Frozen Pizza one I use on Celeste Pizza, which is usually only $1 to start with. Also, when we end up needing an electronic item, there's usually a spend $50 or $100 and get $5 or so offer at Best Buy (plus, we pay using a Best Buy gift card bought from Dlyte).
The amount we earn from Ibotta can majorly vary month to month based on the offers (holiday seasons tend to be the best), but the only month in the last six months we didn't earn at least $20 was October when we were traveled most of the month and only bought groceries one week. Paying attention the rebates that unlock the bonuses and adding one or two if we're close to the monthly teamwork bonus also helps boost our grocery budget using Ibotta.
I have been using Ibotta since November 2012 and over the years I have found the offers to have mostly improved in variety that interest me and being worthwhile to take advantage of. However, since you now have to wait until $20 to cash out, I just use it as a nice bonus instead of counting on it when making my grocery list that week be under $50 when it used to be $5 and I could cash out more
frequently.
Overall I find Ibotta useful for helping add some variety and trying new things as it often has rebate for new products, which tend to also be on sale and/or have other coupons available when they come out. The Any Brand rebates are also great for stocking up things we tend to end up using anyways, such as there's regularly a $0.25 Frozen Pizza one I use on Celeste Pizza, which is usually only $1 to start with. Also, when we end up needing an electronic item, there's usually a spend $50 or $100 and get $5 or so offer at Best Buy (plus, we pay using a Best Buy gift card bought from Dlyte).
The amount we earn from Ibotta can majorly vary month to month based on the offers (holiday seasons tend to be the best), but the only month in the last six months we didn't earn at least $20 was October when we were traveled most of the month and only bought groceries one week. Paying attention the rebates that unlock the bonuses and adding one or two if we're close to the monthly teamwork bonus also helps boost our grocery budget using Ibotta.
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Using Dlyte to Boost Our Grocery Budget
Dlyte is a website where you can buy gift cards for a variety of stores and earn points that you can apply to future gift card purchases from them. Many gift cards are delivered electronically, such as Amazon, but there are also some physical gift cards, such as Safeway. The amount of points earned depend on the retailer, but the value (400 points=$1) for redeeming them is the same no matter what gift card you are using them on.
The great thing about using Dlyte is that I still get my credit card points, which we always keep paid off so that's just extra money earned for household expenses (or vacation savings), while also boosting the grocery budget by at least another 1%.
Since our favorite grocery store is Safeway, the main way we use Dlyte to help make our $50 a week grocery budget go farther is by purchasing Safeway gift cards. These are physical gift cards and there is a $100 order minimum, so I buy them every two to three weeks.
Safeway cards earn you 4 points per $1. Every time I order them I use whatever Dlyte points I have, which is at minimum 400 points from the last time I bought them. Thus, after the initial purchase I never pay more than $99 for the $100 in Safeway gift cards. I still try to stick to a $50/week budget at Safeway, but this helps us have some grocery money for deals at other stores and our Washington Post subscription.
We also try to purchase gift cards through Dlyte for our other purchases we make, so that we can earn some points to use towards our grocery gift cards. Mostly we only buy only the closest to the amount we are going to be spending anyways without going over, but whenever I don't have enough Amazon gift card money for a purchase I buy a whole $50 from Dlyte since eventually we'll use it on things we need or our every other month Subscribe & Save order.
The great thing about using Dlyte is that I still get my credit card points, which we always keep paid off so that's just extra money earned for household expenses (or vacation savings), while also boosting the grocery budget by at least another 1%.
Since our favorite grocery store is Safeway, the main way we use Dlyte to help make our $50 a week grocery budget go farther is by purchasing Safeway gift cards. These are physical gift cards and there is a $100 order minimum, so I buy them every two to three weeks.
Safeway cards earn you 4 points per $1. Every time I order them I use whatever Dlyte points I have, which is at minimum 400 points from the last time I bought them. Thus, after the initial purchase I never pay more than $99 for the $100 in Safeway gift cards. I still try to stick to a $50/week budget at Safeway, but this helps us have some grocery money for deals at other stores and our Washington Post subscription.
We also try to purchase gift cards through Dlyte for our other purchases we make, so that we can earn some points to use towards our grocery gift cards. Mostly we only buy only the closest to the amount we are going to be spending anyways without going over, but whenever I don't have enough Amazon gift card money for a purchase I buy a whole $50 from Dlyte since eventually we'll use it on things we need or our every other month Subscribe & Save order.
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