I do not get any money if you use Giftloop.

I’ll keep this review short and to the point: I earned about 850 coins by charging and unlocking my phone with Giftloop. I used it for a couple days, but it was so annoying I couldn’t keep going. You need like 200,000 coins to get a reward. I was not going to make it that far. Every time your phone needs to be unlocked, you have to pass a click to get to your phone. This is not worth it for me. You can turn this off to make less coins. You can set it to only do this when you are charging your phone. Regardless, it was annoying. I didn’t want to deal with this every time I used my phone. I figure they know this, and most users will not make enough coins to get a reward.

Don’t waste your time.

Let me know if you used Giftloop and what you thought.

I get a small bonus if you use my link to sign up for ReceiptPal. I have been using this app for a while. You get 100 points for 4 receipts from just about anywhere. You are able to get a maximum of 300 points a week from receipts. Each receipt is also an entry in the weekly $250 drawing. The smallest reward is 2000 points for a $5  Amazon gift card, up to 26,000 points for a $100 Amazon gift card.

It may take awhile to get a big reward. But it take a couple of minutes to scan in the receipts that you might just throw away anyway. Why not get a little money for the receipts?

If you end up trying ReceiptPal, let me know it how it works out for you.

Foster a pet. Do you like cats and/or dogs? Do you not want to fully commit to owning an animal? You might want to foster a pet. You will help the pet and yourself. In most cases when you foster a pet, you do not pay for its food or veterinarian bills.

From the SPCA page: For canines and felines, the SPCA will provide crates, carriers, food bowls, bedding, towels, toys, leash/collar, food (dry and canned), newspaper, puppy pads, litter, litter box/scooper. They will also provide a heating pad, bottles, and milk replacement for very young/bottle babies. The SPCA also covers the cost of all medical care, including vaccines, flea prevention, or trips to the vet.

Please note the link is to the Wake County SPCA. You will most likely have a local animal shelter or county SPCA that will cover mostly the same things. This is a thrifty way to have a pet, and you’re saving an animal’s life.

You may end up falling in love and adopting your foster animal. Then you have to pay for all that stuff yourself.

I hope you will save an animal!

Do you read magazines? If so, you will love Valuemags. If you sign up, you will get free magazines sent to your house. You do not pay anything, and it’s not automatically renewed.

Once you sign up, you get to choose from their basic magazines. Valuemags will send you regular emails. The good thing about this is — for every email you open you get 5 MagPoints. With these points you can trade them in for rewards. In the past they had Starbucks gift cards, however they have not had anything great for a while. They will randomly email you allowing you to sign up for more premium magazines.

If you read magazines, you might as well sign up and get them for free. Perhaps you can get something good with the MagPoints, eventually.

This post is about gas rewards clubs. Signing up for these gas clubs only takes a couple of minutes. You will save on every gas purchase.

Sheetz Rewards: You save 3¢ per gallon of gas purchased. You get an extra gas discount on your birthday, and free food points. You also get extra points when every time you buy Sheetz brand stuff inside the store.

Exxon Mobil: You get an instant discount for joining. You will then earn 3 points per gallon on fuel and 2 points for every $1 you spend in the convenience store and on car washes. 100 points is $1 off from gas. While this is not a great deal, it stacks with everything else I have blogged on. You are going to buy the gas anyway, so you might as well save money.

BP: BP has the weirdest program. Your first option is easy. You choose fuel rewards, you’ll get 10¢ off per gallon for every $100 spent on gas. The second option is United Miles. If you choose miles, you’ll earn up to 3 MileagePlus miles with every gallon of BP fuel purchased. The amount of miles is dependent on your linking a credit card. I chose miles as BP is normally the most expensive, and its an easy way to make sure my United Miles don’t expire.

These are some club options. If you have any additional clubs that sound good please let me know. Really, they should give us cheaper gas, so we don’t have to jump through all these hoops. I do not have a solution for that.

Disclaimer. I do not get any rewards for advertising this. I just think it’s a good promotion. Google Opinion Rewards is a survey app from Google.

Pros: I like that the surveys take one to two minutes at most. I have seen them pay anywhere from ten cents to over a dollar. They are easy surveys. You can spend the credits you make in the Google Play Store. You can buy anything from pay apps, ebooks, to audio books. If you play Pokemon Go, and want to buy some Poke Ball, you can use it for this also.

Cons: You can only spend the money in Google Play Store. If you don’t spend the money, it will disappear one year from the time awarded. Another agitating thing about the app: if you update the app, you will need to relaunch it for it to keep giving you surveys, or it will stop giving surveys. The surveys are kind of sporadic, maybe three one day, then the next two weeks, nothing.

My opinion: you might want to keep your data private, but it’s Google so they know it all, anyway. Get the app. You will need to buy something from Google Play Store one day, and you’ll be glad to have the credits. If not, perhaps you can get a audio book or something.

I don’t get a kickback if you get a PenFed card. I think it is one of the best gas cards currently out there.

With this card, I get 5 points per dollar on gas purchases. The current reward for 5900 points is a $50 gift card. This card gives you a gas savings of about 4%. If gas is $3 a gallon, you save a little more than 12 cents a gallon, not including any other offers you use.

This card also gives 3 points for grocery stores and 1 point for everything else. The grocery store points  don’t change. The rewards are this way all the time. I don’t have to think what will my point reward be this month or week.

The card has two additional benefits:
1. There are no international charges. You can use it anywhere they take credit card, and you are not charged international fees.
2. They give car rental insurance. This can save you money when you rent a car.

This card does have one challenge: PenFed is a Federal Credit Union with some rules. You need to be a member of the Penfed Credit Union before you can apply for the card. However, you can do this by opening a share account and depositing $5. You will also need to make a one-time donation to one of their charities, which is like $20. After this, you should be able to apply for the credit card, as long as your credit is good.

I have been very happy with this credit card. The share account is kind of silly. That is it though; there are no further charges.

If you have a better gas credit card, please let me know.

I don’t get any money if you sign up for BJ’s. I have been a BJ’s member for years.  I have done my cost comparisons to Costco. I think as far as price they are about even; though BJs does win by a little. I would not sign up for both.

I have been getting a BJ’s corporate discount for a long time. This would normally give me a couple of extra months, and a slightly cheaper price. The person assigned to do this either isn’t doing it anymore, or either they just got tired of responding to me. So I stopped getting that discount.

I called up BJ’s the month I needed to renew. I just told them I want a lower price. I did not explain why. I got moved to several people, but in under 15 minutes,  I got an additional month and $10 off of the renewal price.

If your a BJ’s shopper let me know if you can do better. If you can do even better at Costco, let me know. Thank you!

Here is my link to try Bumped.

Bumped is an amazing thrifty idea. It was my trigger to start writing thrifty blog posts. Once you are approved, you give them access to your credit cards. You also make some loyalty selections for restaurants/places that you shop at often. When you buy anything from a company you have selected, you get a partial stock. For instance, if you spend $250 at Home Depot, you get $2.50 in Home Depot stock. If you spend $3.00 at Taco Bell, you get $0.06 in YUM stock. If the stock pays dividends you get these as well for the partial share that you own.

You must make loyalty selections. For instance, you must choose between Target and Walmart. You can change your mind but they limit how often you can do this.

Here are the current loyalty choices:
Burgers: McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Wendy’s
Coffee: Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks
Drug Stores: CVS, Walgreens
Family Dining: Applebee’s, Chili’s, Olive Garden, Red Robin
Grocery: Kroger
Home Improvement: Home Depot
Mexican Food: Taco Bell, Chipotle
Music: Spotify, Pandora
Pizza: Domino’s, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut
Telecommunications: AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon
Superstores: Target, Walmart
Video Subscriptions: Netflix, Sling TV
Vineyards: Willamette Valley Vineyards

This is the type of thing you can ignore for a year, and then find you have a lot of stock in a couple of companies. I will now be shopping more at Walmart.

Let me know what you think.

Shellie and I have been trying to spend less money on food. We were going to a music show one night, and we were hungry. Instead of getting fast food, we went “Dollar Tree Dining.” Each of our meals cost less then $5. We had a tasty meal that was pretty healthy, too.

If you’re interested in a fun way to eat cheap, then check out her posts: dollar-tree-dining.