Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Curious Call of Contests




I am a crazy coupon lady. Some of the best hours of my week are rooting around coupon sites and gathering my lists for shopping, trying to get the little total at the end of the bill to savings of 70 %, or more. That’s my goal anyway. With my freelancing being a rather unstable revenue source and the twins getting older and involved in more expensive activities than free play dates, I need to save where I can. 

Which got me thinking.

When I was little, I supplemented my allowance with rebates and prize drawings I entered by saving my parent’s shopping receipts and soaking labels off soup cans and cutting out barcodes on boxes of cake mix and sending the whole package off with high hopes. It was fun, when I was 10. 

However, I'm older and not a little bit skeptical about contests in the electronic age. Will they sell my info, will I be inundated with phone calls and emails? I did a little research, and there are quite a few impressive contests out there, from $25,000 outdoor makeovers to Caribbean getaways.

I decided to make it a contest for myself. I am going to sign up for and/or play at least five contests a day and see what bounty may be returned to us. 

It could be interesting, could be a giant pain in the ass, but I’m curious to see what comes of my little experiment. I'll post about what I've learned, how to safely maneuver these online info grabbers and other tips I find along the way.

Considering we are careening into the holiday season, it’s a great opportunity to fill our volunteer goodie bags that we give to a local charity at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mostly it’s been filled with soups and toothpaste I buy for pennies through couponing, but who knows?

I’ll update weekly on any wins, which contests seem to be worth the effort and other tidbits I hope you’ll find interesting.

Here are my top contest picks for the week (if you are interested, I've chosen these for the least amount of personal info and a deadline to sign up by the end of Nov. in most cases):






Happy contesting!