Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2024-06-26 11:54 pm
brin_bellway) wrote2024-06-26 11:54 pm
Today in penny farming
[cw: poverty, (arguably) venting]
Man, Air Miles really is trying to go from a loyalty program to a whole-ass thing-GPT-*used*-to-mean, huh. Maybe the idea is that it'll help them bounce back from stuff like the loss of their LCBO and Metro partnerships??
It's kind of weird, but I'm not complaining. Mom says the surveys are paying her decently, and this new receipt-data-purchasing system they have is the sleekest I've ever seen: even automatically detects which offers you're eligible for. (*Correctly*!) Normally receipt-buyers are pretty janky: I eventually ended up having to outsource most of the scanning to Mom, even though I'm much better at keeping track of seven apps' slightly different rules, because she has more patience for it.
And in our initial test today of whether they're worth adding to the receipt-selling collection, they gave us...actually, let me do the precise math...$2.84 for buying three packs of any-brand hot dogs this week, which is really quite a lot for a receipt-buyer. I wonder how much of it is them being new and trying to build up a base, and how much of it is that they can afford to be more generous because they're paying in loyalty points. But Dad's a delivery driver and we can't afford a fully electric car (we can, just barely, afford a non-plug-in hybrid), so we can always use more gasoline credits.
---
(And while Dad was out buying hot dogs, I managed to talk him through getting four bags of softener salt for a total of $8 less than they normally cost. A penny saved is more than a penny earned, because it doesn't factor into welfare income-limit calculations. I suppose that's also true of getting Air Miles, for that matter.)
---
The holy grail of survey sites, Prolific, still hasn't let me off the waiting list after two years, but their competitor CloudResearch has opened up to Canadians now and let me in after a mere 13 days. They still have a lot fewer surveys for Canadians than Americans, but pretty much every place is like that, and I've gotten about 10 USD from them over the past month.
("pretty much every place is like that" Well, notably not LEO, which is aimed at Canada *first* and U.S. *second* and which I joined around the same time.)
---
I *think* the RLHF place rejected me, probably, though it's not unheard of for them to abruptly let you in after months of radio silence.
---
Swagbucks offered me 100 USD-equivalents to sign up for Koho, which is, like, an actual reasonably-reputable prepaid-reloadable-credit-card company and not some fly-by-night identity-theft scheme. We'll see if I can get them to hold up their end of the bargain.
---
I've been trying to wrangle a new and improved credit card for Dad (we can probably switch it over to Mom if she ever gets on disability and thereafter Connected for Success, but that'll be several months if ever), but employment screenings are trickier when you're self-employed. (I guess I could switch to Fido and become eligible for one myself, but then I wouldn't get Public Mobile loyalty points anymore, and anyway the 3%-cashback cap is based on the price of your Rogers plan and my mobile plan costs much less than the home Internet.) There's still hope that we can get him in, which would increase our annual cashback by probably a couple hundred bucks.
---
Thinking about trying out some of those website-testing places, though I haven't really dug into it yet. I don't seem to be able to bring myself to do the video-recording ones, but not all of them require that.
---
I am (from experience) confident I can win when going into psychic battle against casinos, where they try to addict you and you try to take the freebies they put out to lure people in and walk off with them; or, at least, I am confident that the failure mode I am prone to does not lead to me losing money to them. (And some of them don't require nearly as much interaction as that one did.)
Not gonna try and rope anyone else in on that, though. *Maybe* Mom could handle it addiction-wise, not that I'm confident enough to, uh, bet on that (and I have serious doubts that Dad could, given that he has three different drug addictions and spends a double-digit percentage of his income on them,I wish I could at least optimise that harder but I'm not up-close-and-personal enough to know which vape products are adequate substitutes for one another, and he won't switch to pills or even store-brand soda for his caffeine), but if nothing else the attempt at doing group bank-account churning was kind of a fiasco: neither of them were capable of staying on top of things, it's been five years and I'm *still* cleaning up the mess that that Manulife churn left. I think we've still turned *some* profit even after, of all fucking things, *dormancy fees*, but not as much as it ought to have been and with *far* more work and far more FBARs.
---
(There really ought to be more referral links in here, but most if not all of them would doxx me to at least some extent. Any detailed advice on how to go about doing these things yourself would have to be in a more private setting.)
---
Can you tell I've been despairing of ever getting a better job, and have been drowning my sorrows in forms of "job"-hunting that, unlike regular job hunting, *actually result in having more money afterward*?
---
The first lesson of what I think of as "hourglass economics"--the art of making the countdown to your inevitable demise run as slowly as possible--is that a gap between income and expenses dies by a thousand cuts. Save (or earn) fifty, a hundred, two hundred a year, and it adds up quickly as you gather more ways of doing so.
I need about 15 - 20k a year.ignoring for the moment that somebody has to support Mom Even with *far* fewer opportunities than the Americans get, you can break four digits doing this kind of thing, which is a substantial fraction of my total living expenses.
Or, to put it another way, we were up by $1,356 last year. Make another $1,356, and you've doubled the amount saved.
(Make another $1,356, in a year *without* any U.S. COVID-stimulus catchup checks, and maybe you make the difference in whether you can save anything at all.)
Man, Air Miles really is trying to go from a loyalty program to a whole-ass thing-GPT-*used*-to-mean, huh. Maybe the idea is that it'll help them bounce back from stuff like the loss of their LCBO and Metro partnerships??
It's kind of weird, but I'm not complaining. Mom says the surveys are paying her decently, and this new receipt-data-purchasing system they have is the sleekest I've ever seen: even automatically detects which offers you're eligible for. (*Correctly*!) Normally receipt-buyers are pretty janky: I eventually ended up having to outsource most of the scanning to Mom, even though I'm much better at keeping track of seven apps' slightly different rules, because she has more patience for it.
And in our initial test today of whether they're worth adding to the receipt-selling collection, they gave us...actually, let me do the precise math...$2.84 for buying three packs of any-brand hot dogs this week, which is really quite a lot for a receipt-buyer. I wonder how much of it is them being new and trying to build up a base, and how much of it is that they can afford to be more generous because they're paying in loyalty points. But Dad's a delivery driver and we can't afford a fully electric car (we can, just barely, afford a non-plug-in hybrid), so we can always use more gasoline credits.
---
(And while Dad was out buying hot dogs, I managed to talk him through getting four bags of softener salt for a total of $8 less than they normally cost. A penny saved is more than a penny earned, because it doesn't factor into welfare income-limit calculations. I suppose that's also true of getting Air Miles, for that matter.)
---
The holy grail of survey sites, Prolific, still hasn't let me off the waiting list after two years, but their competitor CloudResearch has opened up to Canadians now and let me in after a mere 13 days. They still have a lot fewer surveys for Canadians than Americans, but pretty much every place is like that, and I've gotten about 10 USD from them over the past month.
("pretty much every place is like that" Well, notably not LEO, which is aimed at Canada *first* and U.S. *second* and which I joined around the same time.)
---
I *think* the RLHF place rejected me, probably, though it's not unheard of for them to abruptly let you in after months of radio silence.
---
Swagbucks offered me 100 USD-equivalents to sign up for Koho, which is, like, an actual reasonably-reputable prepaid-reloadable-credit-card company and not some fly-by-night identity-theft scheme. We'll see if I can get them to hold up their end of the bargain.
---
I've been trying to wrangle a new and improved credit card for Dad (we can probably switch it over to Mom if she ever gets on disability and thereafter Connected for Success, but that'll be several months if ever), but employment screenings are trickier when you're self-employed. (I guess I could switch to Fido and become eligible for one myself, but then I wouldn't get Public Mobile loyalty points anymore, and anyway the 3%-cashback cap is based on the price of your Rogers plan and my mobile plan costs much less than the home Internet.) There's still hope that we can get him in, which would increase our annual cashback by probably a couple hundred bucks.
---
Thinking about trying out some of those website-testing places, though I haven't really dug into it yet. I don't seem to be able to bring myself to do the video-recording ones, but not all of them require that.
---
I am (from experience) confident I can win when going into psychic battle against casinos, where they try to addict you and you try to take the freebies they put out to lure people in and walk off with them; or, at least, I am confident that the failure mode I am prone to does not lead to me losing money to them. (And some of them don't require nearly as much interaction as that one did.)
Not gonna try and rope anyone else in on that, though. *Maybe* Mom could handle it addiction-wise, not that I'm confident enough to, uh, bet on that (and I have serious doubts that Dad could, given that he has three different drug addictions and spends a double-digit percentage of his income on them,
---
(There really ought to be more referral links in here, but most if not all of them would doxx me to at least some extent. Any detailed advice on how to go about doing these things yourself would have to be in a more private setting.)
---
Can you tell I've been despairing of ever getting a better job, and have been drowning my sorrows in forms of "job"-hunting that, unlike regular job hunting, *actually result in having more money afterward*?
---
The first lesson of what I think of as "hourglass economics"--the art of making the countdown to your inevitable demise run as slowly as possible--is that a gap between income and expenses dies by a thousand cuts. Save (or earn) fifty, a hundred, two hundred a year, and it adds up quickly as you gather more ways of doing so.
I need about 15 - 20k a year.
Or, to put it another way, we were up by $1,356 last year. Make another $1,356, and you've doubled the amount saved.
(Make another $1,356, in a year *without* any U.S. COVID-stimulus catchup checks, and maybe you make the difference in whether you can save anything at all.)