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Archive for December, 2012

I'm not complaining, but...

December 25th, 2012 at 07:03 pm

As you know if you follow my blog, I'm a physician and do a lot of medical surveys. These pay well but lately, one aspect of doing them has become a bit of a nuisance. They used to almost all pay by check. Very simple. Deposit it into my account and I'm done.

More and more of them, however, are now paying with prepaid Visa cards. I used to get one of those occasionally and it wasn't a big deal. I would just stick it in my wallet and use it at the grocery store usually. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but now it is getting kind of annoying. In the past week alone, I've gotten three of them: one for $48, one for $100, and one for $350. That's in addition to others that I've gotten previously and not used yet.

My dresser now has a little stack of Visa cards. Not that it is a bad thing to have the money, but I'd rather not have it all sitting on my dresser both for safety reasons and liquidity reasons. Also, the cards do have expiration dates so not only do I need to keep track of which cards I've used and what balances remain on them, I also need to organize the order the cards get used to avoid having them expire. When you're getting 2 or 3 of these cards per week, that becomes a bit of a challenge.

I'm guessing that for some reason, issuing these cards is cheaper and more convenient for the companies than sending checks, but for the recipients, it can be a bit of a pain.

November 2012 Surveys

December 3rd, 2012 at 11:19 pm

I had a good month in November earning $807 from medical surveys. That was helped a lot by one in-person interview I did for $200. I get invited to a lot of those but they aren't usually at times when I can attend. So overall, a good month.