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Home > Archive: December, 2014

Archive for December, 2014

A few snowflakes, some courtesy of fellow SA bloggers!

January 1st, 2015 at 02:34 am

Happy New Year's Eve! I have some snowflakes to tally in these last few hours of 2014. Obviously, I am staying home tonight. Smile

Discover cash back 254.44
Chase Freedom cash back 219.80
Swagbucks $$ balance in Paypal 517.11 (will soon be 542.11)
Found money while walking in NJ during Thanksgiving .55
"Local" money 140.00
Bottle/can returns 7.65
Amazon gift cards (swagbucks) 80.00

The rewards cash, Amazon gift cards and Swagbucks cash are all courtesy of fellow SA bloggers! I would never have thought to use credit card reward/bonuses without reading about them here. And, when I signed up for the Chase Freedom card, the bonus reward was $100. I then found out through a blog that it had increased to $200. An SAer suggest that I message Chase to see if I could get the additional $100 bonus. I ended calling Chase with a website question and when I asked about the extra bonus, the customer service rep said he couldn't do anything about it. So, I did decide to try messaging Chase and got a positive response that the extra bonus points were added to my rewards account – yippee! I also learned about Swagbucks from this site, too, and have become fairly efficient at gathering the points.

The "local" money was given to me as a Christmas present from co-workers a few years ago. It could only be spent in local stores and I could never decide what to buy with it. I recently realized that it was going to expire in December and after discovering that it was issued by a bank, I called and learned that I could get real cash as change when I used it. I had two $20s and two $50s, so I bought four small things around town and banked the change!

The bottles and cans that I returned were almost all either left at my house when people visited for dinner, etc., or found at work. I randomly found change in three different places during a Thanksgiving walk in my hometown and it added up to 55 cents.

Not sure yet what I'm going to with the total sum of the snowflakes. For now, the cash portion will go into my kitchen renovation fund. I'm toying with the idea of having that done later in 2015. I'm going to at least start to seriously think about it and plan.

Just realized that I never calculated the snowflake total - $1219.55!