MTurk How To is finished

OK so I just Posted the second Part to my MTurk guide. So if you're new and want to see how to get started check out the guides below:

Part 1: MTurk How to

Part 2: Getting Paid

Good Luck everybody and Happy Turking!

That went better than expected...

So I'm now just over a week into Turking and I made my first purchase this morning, Thanks to Amazon Prime my game should show up on Friday. I've decided I'm going to limit myself to one game a week. This week it was Elder Sign . basically a co-op game for 1-8 player's which is essentially a stripped down version of another game called Arkham Horror. Since I don't usually have 3-6 hours to play a board game I decided to go with the light version of it.

I also decided that since my balance is still quite high I'm going to stick $50 into our savings account which leaves me with just over $20 in my Amazon Balance. Not bad if I say so myself! Since my approval came through on most of my balances here was the updated amounts before I started spending money:

Thus far, Mechanical Turk is a great way to hunker down and buy some of the things you might not otherwise. Or even just add to your monthly income. I figure I am going to try and stick with making $5-$6 a day for the next little while and just see how things end up.

Check back as I'll be trying some different things this week, and I'll keep everyone updated on what is available out there!

ALSO: If you have any questions or are interested, please make sure and ask them via the comments. I'll help in anyway I can, It's been good for me so far, and I don't see why it can't be as good for other people..

First Attempt - Mechanical Turk

So the first thing I decided to try was Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

What exactly is a mechanical turk you ask? Basically amazon has setup a service where people can log in and complete mundane tasks that computers and A.I. can't quite accomplish yet. There are Companies/Universities/Etc. that have a bunch of busy work they need done, so they outsource it to whomever wants to do it. usually for pennies on the dollar.

Be warned that this method does require actual work. You choose a task (called a HIT) and if you complete it you will get paid. There are some scammer's on there so you should probably be somewhat careful as to which HIT's you accept. However in my experience they are few and far between.

HIT's range from anywhere from $0.01 and I have seen some as high as $18. Now you do have to be qualified for the high paying HIT's and most of those require that you be very good at writing. If you are, and are willing to churn out articles for Travel blogs or any other type of article, then I guess you could actually make a lot of money. While my writing isn't that great I figured I'd start small and go from there.

The website that is extremely helpful here is another blog called:  HIT's worth turking for. Basically, Justin tries to go on every day and find some easy hits that pay between $0.50 and $1 and link to them on his site.  His efforts are appreciated and he has quite a following. Because of that some of those HIT's don't last very long, so if you're interested it pays to check his site a couple of times a day.

-Personal Experience-

So I started Turking on 1/08/2012 and so far I have been very pleased. I found a guy that has a bunch of Spanish to English translations things that he needs done. They only pay $0.15 per hit and I average about a minute and a half per hit. I'm afraid I've gotten kind of addicted. If you figure it out hourly it's not even minimum wage, but for time i would have wasted at night watching TV or browsing the web, I have no qualms about it.

I found out that you have to be active for 10 days before they will pay out. (I don't think it's consecutively, just ten total day, meaning you don't have to be on straight for 10 days...) You can either link your bank account with your Amazon payments account, or just opt for an Amazon gift card. I linked my account and so I can just transfer the money over if I want to. Even though most of my purchases will be on Amazon, it will be nice to just have the option to put money into my account if I'd rather.

Have a look at my first 9 days, and tell me what you think:

Click the picture for a larger version.

So far so good. I don't think I can keep up with the 100 HIT's a day though. I think it would burn me out. If I can get on and spend half and hour to make $5 a day, I think it's totally worth it. Let me know if you have any questions, and I will try and respond.

Until Then, Happy Turking!

New year, new stuff

Welcome, welcome everybody so with this new year my wife and I finally decided to get our finances in order. We've set ourselves up a budget and are doing our best to stick to it. One service that we've found that has made our lives easier is the website Mint.com It's run by Intuit (The guys behind Quicken/Quickbooks.) It's not perfect, but it is free, and secure. We can check our account balances and budget balance any time on our smartphones. It really is worth checking out. It did struggle with adding out Mountain America account right off the bat, but after an email to the support guys, they seem to have it mostly figured out.

While I was browsing REDDIT one day i was turned on to the /r/beermoney subreddit (basically it's a forum where people are trying to make extra money online.) They have a few strong suggestions as to what sites are the best and what is the best way to make it happen. So I figured I will give it a go, and decided I would chronicle my experiences on this blog, for anybody that might be interested. 

I have been big into Board Games this past year and have been trying to figure out how I can continue to grow my collection without affecting our budget. So far I have been quite impressed but we will see how well it continues.