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Home > Archive: September, 2007

Archive for September, 2007

September Survey Total

September 30th, 2007 at 02:02 am

Quick recap - I am a physician and get to do various online medical surveys. These are not the kind available to the general public. They can be fairly detailed, really quite tedious at times, but pay very well. I used to skip a lot of them just because I didn't feel like doing them or wasn't in the mood or whatever. I decided a few months ago to see how much I could earn if I did every single one I could.

So far, I got $293 in June, $370 in July and $271.25 in August.

Anyway, September was a banner month. I just added everything up and for the month, I earned $580!! I can't believe I used to let these things go. That's a total of $1,514.25 in 4 months. I certainly won't ever ignore those e-mails again.

More Amazon shopping

September 24th, 2007 at 04:36 pm

I posted awhile ago about how I do surveys for one company that pays me in Amazon.com gift certificates. I get $30 each time I do one, and I've done as many as 5 in a month, so the money adds up pretty quickly. At first, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it all, but the more I browse, the more I've discovered that Amazon sells pretty much everything. And they have pretty good prices, too. My most recent order, a few days ago, was a scientific calculator DD needs for school, vacuum cleaner bags and an ink cartridge for my printer. After that order, I checked to see if they sell the filters for my aquarium, and sure enough they sell those too. So rather than ordering from the pet supply company I've always used, I'll start getting them from Amazon with my free credits.

The great thing about this particular survey company is I can do their surveys pretty much whenever I want. I don't have to wait to be invited. I log in to my account and there is a list of available programs. I can even do a program more than once, as long as it is still on my list. The only negative is I can only do them until 6pm Monday-Friday and, I think, until 4pm on Saturday. Of course, most of my free time is in the evening. I'd do one every night if I could.

Correcting my wife's 401K

September 24th, 2007 at 02:48 am

My wife started her new job back in July. We signed her up for the 401K and requested 50% of her salary go to the plan. The first couple of paychecks, only 3% was deducted, which they do automatically, so we just figured they hadn't processed the request yet. Then we went away for 2 weeks followed by her surgery, so she didn't work for about a month all together.

On Friday, she got her paycheck and they are still only deducting 3%. I went online tonight and downloaded the salary reduction form and we filled it out again and will mail it in the morning. Hopefully, this will solve the problem and she'll start getting the 50% deducted and the full company match.

Very nice e-mail from survey company $$

September 17th, 2007 at 11:11 pm

I got an e-mail today from one of the online companies for which I do medical surveys. It said that I have accumulated $165 in my account for surveys done dating back to April but I need to log-in to my account and confirm my mailing address before they can send out a check.

I didn't start closely tracking the surveys I do until June or July, so I didn't realize I had never been paid for these surveys.

So that was a nice surprise. I should be getting that $165 soon now that I've confirmed my address for them. Apparently they've changed their system so checks will now be sent automatically and not have to be requested (which I didn't even realize was the existing system). Why would anyone not want the check sent out? Kind of a dumb system.

Nice day in Atlantic City

September 10th, 2007 at 01:34 am

Our daughter went on a rafting trp today from our temple youth group so DW and I took a ride down to Atlantic City.

We went to the Showboat casino. Haven't been there for years. We also wanted to see the new shops/restaurants they opened at Taj Mahal which is next door, and I figured we'd visit my cousin who has a store at Resorts (Caprice).

We got down about 10:45am. We wandered through Showboat, just looking around and checking out the smoking/non-smoking sections (we HATE being anywhere near smoke). Then we walked over to Taj to see the new shops. By then we were getting hungry and headed back to Showboat to decide where to eat.

We decided to do the buffet, but they didn't open until noon, so we hit the casino for a half hour or so. I played blackjack (that's all I play) and won $20. DW played video blackjack and lost some (not sure how much - no a lot).

Lunch was very good. The buffet is $17.99/person and I had a $7 comp coupon, so with tax and tip it came to $34.

After lunch, we walked down to Resorts to visit my cousin. There was a special prize drawing every hour at Showboat. We had been there for 1:00 and 2:00 so we made sure to be back for 3:00 and 4:00 (but we didn't win). We played for another 40 minutes or so, and I won another $80, before we called it a day. We had to pick up DD at 6:00 so we couldn't stay too much later than that (although she ended up not getting home until 7:15 but we didn't know that at the time).

Overall, a very nice day. The weather was beautiful, though a bit humid. I won $100. DW lost some, but not nearly that much - I think about $25. We got a $7 comp for food and enjoyed a great buffet.

August Survey Totals

September 1st, 2007 at 11:52 pm

Happy September. Time to look back at the past month. I collected a total of $271.25 from online surveys for the month. That's actually lower than I expected because I did one survey for $125 at the end of July but haven't received the check yet. Certainly not complaining, though.

I also earned points at mysurvey and a medical site that has a rewards catalog rather than cash payments.