The Chief's Birthday - Amazon and Swagbucks

The Chief's birthday is coming up. Julius's birthday is coming up, too. But this post is not about that.

Since I don't have my own income, it's impossible for me to buy things for Lee without him knowing about it. That makes his birthday pretty anticlimactic.

But this year I had a plan. I started earning Swagbucks in February. I use the Swagbucks search engine, and it accumulates points each day. Since I surf a lot, I earn pretty well. As the points accumulate, I can earn prizes. The best prize for me is Amazon gift cards. In two and a half months I earned $25 in Amazon gift cards. It's not a huge amount, but sinces its basically effortless for me, it's a good bonus. You can also earn swagbucks by shopping through their links - I earned a few bucks from a purchase I made from Walmart.com, and a few from a magazine subscription. I don't use that as much because I don't do a whole lot of buying online.

Today I figured out what Lee really wanted for his birthday. Books. No surprise there. Now Amazon happens to sell those. They also sell everything else, conveniently enough. We have Amazon Prime, so we get free shipping on any order. And there was a book series Lee was interested in (I keep track of these things on our wish list) which happened to be a part of the 4-for-3 Special. Since each paperback was $7.99, I was able to get four books for my accumulated $25 - the fourth book was free. Four books is a nice amount for Lee's birthday, I think, and he will really appreciate them.

So it's really exciting for me - I have four nice presents for the Chief, and I earned them myself just using Swagbucks. I am pretty proud of myself. And I definitely recommend Swagbucks to anyone who surfs a lot and wants to just earn a little extra for almost nothing.