Who likes free money? Me! Me!

As I've said numerous times, I'm a huge freak about money.

The sad truth is, I make more money now than I ever had in my life. And I still feel like I'm never going to make enough. What really slammed my head into the wall was that in August of this year, my expenses increased by...gulp...$800 a month in childcare and student loans. I really feel fortunate and lucky that we have been able to meet that extra expense, but it doesn't leave a lot for, um, walking around money. Or whatever you want to call it. I know a lot of people are worse off than me, and I'm really grateful for all I do have, of course, but still. Money just sends me to the ceiling lately.

That being said, I've found a couple of easy ways to make a little money and I thought I'd share. As a word of warning, these are NOT get rich-quick schemes. Believe me, you aren't going to become a millionaire and be able to quit your day job or anything. But they are all interesting ways to earn a small amount of money and in my opinion, any amount of money is good.

The first one is CashCrate. The first day I signed up, I earned $17.05 in one hour for doing things like answering surveys. A lot of the information is very, very repetitive, but if you don't mind something like that you could probably make about $20.00 a month. It is completely free and really easy. They send you checks each month that you make over $10.00. Sweet!

I know, $20 isn't going to cure the national debt. It will, however, buy one of my children a yearbook. So I'll take it.

The second one is Hit$forPay. I get paid for reading emails. No, seriously.

Now, sadly, they aren't emails from old high school friends or anything. Usually they are trying to sell me something, but that's okay, because I don't have to buy it in order to get the money.

Again, this does not pay well. I think it's like 2 cents per email or something. But the emails come fairly steadily AND this company gives you $10.00 just for signing up, which rocks. And seriously? Someone gives me any kind of money for looking at an email for 30 seconds? Yeah. Okay. I'll take it.

This company pays automatically to your PayPal (also free!) account once you reach $25.00. Like I said, won't cure the national debt, or even Chick's debt, but it's still free money.

Before using either one of these sites I would highly recommend that you:

1) Get yourself a free Yahoo or Gmail account specifically for things like this. Because you will get about 12 tons of email. I have them sent to a Gmail account which is very good about filtering out spam and it saves me from a lot of the crap.
2) Most of these things ask for a phone number, although honestly? I've not gotten one call from any of them. I haven't looked into getting a private voice mail box (also free!) for something like this, but someone I know recommended PrivatePhone. (Like I said, I don't know anything about them though)
3) You don't have to buy anything. You have to sit through boring ads and "Are you interested in this vacation/"free" something/penis enlargement/whatever?" but you don't have to buy ANYTHING. I never buy ANYTHING. I never give my credit card number to ANYONE. And I still get paid.
Usually at the bottom of whatever you are looking at there will be a skip button. You can skip. Skip all you want. Skip to my Lou, my darling. Just get to the end of the survey or whatever, so you'll get paid.

Some of it is crap and some of it is actually interesting, especially the surveys. Like I said, you won't get rich, but maybe you'll be able to SuperSize your extra value meal.

So there you go. That's my good deed for today.

Unless you are trying to lose weight, and then I suck for telling you to SuperSize. Sorry.