3 Ways to Earn Extra Cash for Christmas

Earn some extra cash for Christmas. Ariya J/Shutterstock

It’s still October, but it’s not too early to start planning for Christmas. If you’re ready to make this year a debt-free Christmas, I’ve got three very useful ways to find the extra cash you'll need to do that. And time is of the essence because Christmas will be here before we know it.

Rather than choose one of the following options, I suggest you consider doing all three. Don’t let that intimidate you. And don’t worry about having to start up a side business or make any kind of upfront investment, either. The options that follow are all free and require nothing but your spare time to begin racking up extra cash.

Swagbucks

Swagbucks is an online rewards program that gives users points (Swag Bucks, or SBs) for various tasks. One hundred points equals $1. Points can be traded in for eGift cards for more than 1,500 popular merchants like Amazon, Target, Starbucks and Walmart. Don’t want gift cards? Redeem your points for cold, hard cash via PayPal.

Swagbucks rewards members for the everyday things they already do online like shopping, answering surveys and polls, watching entertaining videos, discovering videos, searching the web and even playing games. Members can earn SBs online and using the mobile app.

To get started, create your free Swagbucks account at Swagbucks.com. Once verified (you‘ll get a verification email message), you’ll get your first five SBs. Then take a quick survey or watch a five-minute video. The opportunities to earn SBs will be endless.

Do as little or as much as you want.

Swagbucks is super easy to use, and you'll be amazed how quickly you can earn SBs. We have EC readers who earn hundreds of dollars every year that they earmark for Christmas shopping!

You can choose to speed up your earnings by searching for online tutorials and following the Swagbucks Facebook page.

Rakuten

Rakuten is a free rebate site that you’ve read about here and there. I hope you are already earning cash-back rebates when you shop online at any number of popular retailers like Best Buy, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Old Navy, Priceline, Target, Chico’s, Groupon and thousands more.

If you have not yet joined Rakuten, open your free account. It’s super easy and quite amazing how much you can earn on purchases you would have made anyway.

Here’s the way you can turbocharge your Rakuten account to give you even more extra cash this Christmas: Refer friends and relatives to open their free Rakuten account. Rakuten will pay you a whopping $30 for every new member you refer, who then shops and makes a purchase at one of its partner merchants’ sites. And there is no limit to how many referral fees you can earn. When you open your Rakuten account, you will get your unique referral link, which you can use at will—even on social media. Because Rakuten sends checks out once each quarter, you need to get going now to make sure you have the cash in hand for Christmas.

Website Testing

If you feel fairly comfortable navigating websites and giving your honest feedback, website testing may be your ideal side hustle. User Testing is a company that tests websites to give feedback to site developers. They need people like you who are not familiar with those websites to test them and give valuable feedback from the typical user’s standpoint.

To get started, watch the very helpful introductory video on the User Testing site. It will walk you through the steps to get started and qualify as a tester so you can start earning cash—up to $30 an hour. Testers can easily complete three tests ($10 each) per hour—when they want and in their spare time.

Once you sign up to be a website user tester, you‘ll take a qualifying test. Once you submit your test results, it takes two to three days to hear back. It is not unusual to fail the test on the first try. Just know that. Don’t get discouraged. And plan to try again. Once you get the hang of how to give excellent test responses, you’ll be on your way.

22 More Testing Opportunities

User Testing is only one website testing opportunity out there. There are at least 22 more online sources where you can get paid as a site tester. There is nothing to stop you from applying to all of them!

There you go, three ways to find extra cash for Christmas. Get started today!

You will find links for all of the following sources at EverydayCheapskate.com/extracash.