Finance Friday: MTurk

Hey, so I totally missed Fiber Friday last week. For good reason though, I had a shawl blocking, but my dad also happened to be in the same state as me. So he and I got to sort of hang out and introduce the future in-laws. Fiber Friday should be back next week, hopefully it will be a good one ;)

Do you love Amazon? Do you have an Amazon wishlist a mile long, but an empty wallet? Here's a solution-ish. While I'm yet to see great returns from this, it has helped here and there with some extra dollars.

There's this place called Amazon Mechanical Turk, found at mturk.com . It's run by Amazon, and will link to your Amazon Payments account.

So what is it? Well, it's surveys and tasks. I stick mostly with the surveys because some of the 'tasks' are sketchy like "Download this program and test it". Ummmm.... viruses and hard drive malfunctions anyone?

A lot of the surveys I take seem to be preliminary research for graduate students getting ready for their thesis and such. Some are really short, like 5-10 minutes. But some are over an hour long. (I'm yet to actually take the entire hour to complete the survey though, I'm a fast reader.) And often have quality control questions in them to make sure you are actually paying attention.

The only downfall to this is you have to 'qualify' in order to get higher paying tasks. For the first few months I used this, I could only qualify for tasks that paid $.01- $.50. But, it does add up over time. And when you do start to qualify, you can make a few bucks per completed task.

Then, as you shop on Amazon, during checkout it will ask if you want to use your Payment Account balance, letting you know how much is in there, for your purchase. So, you don't have to charge your card or bank account if you have enough.

If you want the cash, I know that you can cash out the balance, as long as it's over $1.00. Personally I like to set a goal and work to it before withdrawing so it really makes a difference if/when I do withdraw.

This is a great way to get some extra cash during commercial breaks, or during your lunch breaks, even for an hour or two on weekends!

Good luck and happy earnings!