Answering surveys for rewards

I am not sure if this qualifies as a hobby, but it is something that I am interested in, and thought maybe other people are interested as well.
There are a lot of survey websites on the internet, and you can earn points for answering surveys, and then cash those points in for gift cards, or even money in your PayPal account.

Some of the surveys just take a few minutes to do, and you only earn a few cents with each one, but others can be several weeks long and you can earn a substantial amount of money. Also, you can sometimes get extra points if you refer people to the survey websites; so I was thinking that if other people here have good servey websites, we can share with each other , too.

One of my favorites is called Paid Viewpoint. You never go all the way through the survey and then get told you do not qualify, like some survey places do, so every survey you do, you get points for, and you can do several every day and cash out when you get to around $15. I usually get Amazon gift cards, but they have lots of other options.

Some surveys are for health issues, and since some of us here are seniors, we know all about health problems.
I recently did a survey focus group for congestive heart failure that paid me $450 in rewards. It lasted around 3 weeks, and I just had to fill out a little online journal several times each week, and I actually enjoyed doing it.
The company sends me out a qualification survey for this kind of focus group, and you just do a short survey of whether you have the right illness (or whatever) that the survey is looking for.

I just did a qualification survey for testing a new kind of dog food, and if I am accepted (actually Marco Poodle is the one who will be doing the dog food testing), then it pays $375 for feeding it to Poodle for 8 weeks and reporting on how he likes it. We qualified in the preliminary survey, so it is just waiting to see if Poodle is one of the dogs selected to try the new dog food.

This is something that a person can do in spare time when you are just looking for something to do , and there are enough different survey websites that you can do as much or as little as you want to do.

Cindy used to do those every now and then, and she actually got about $1,500 a year from it. Very few were testing products though, mostly she did opinion surveys. She did sign up for all kinds of freebies for pets and when she got a bag full of goodies we would take it to the no kill shelter. She entered contests too, and won a box of rawhide bones and 50 lb. bag of "Ol' Roy" dog food from Walmart. Since we didn't have any pets, the no kill shelter got all that stuff.

She was worried that might count as income and asked the SSA about it and the lady just smiled and said, "No... Have fun."

I think that it does not count as income unless you were making a whole lot of money taking surveys, and that would be really hard to do. But even the gift cards every so often are great for me.
I just got the acceptance email for the dog food survey this morning, and they will be sending out the dog food for Poodle in the next weeks sometime.
Hopefully, Poodle likes it, because we have to complete the whole 8 weeks of feeding it to him to be paid for the survey.
It takes them about a month to put the reward in my account and then another month to send the gift cards, so it would be fall before I can actually use the gift cards on Amazon.

Yvonne Smith said:

Hopefully, Poodle likes it, because we have to complete the whole 8 weeks of feeding it to him to be paid for the survey.

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No, you don't. It's just a survey... All they want is your opinion. And they have no way of proving whatever you say, one way or another. Cindy used to do those all the time. Some company would send her a box of food and she was supposed to feed it to our dog. But we didn't have a dog.

When we donated the food to the no kill shelter, the dogs went after it like crazy, so she told them "our dogs" loved it. That's what they want to hear so they were happy, and she got her survey points. On the other hand, you could tell them that you refuse to feed the food to your dog because you don't like the smell of it. It gives your dog bad breath, it gives them gas, it turns them into poop machines, whatever pops into your head.

Nobody ever questioned why she said anything, they just wrote her opinions in their logs or whatever it is that they do with it...

We received 4 bags of unmarked dog food, about 10 lbs each, which will last Poodle for months to come. He likes the dog food, and is eating it just fine.
Somewhere in the information , it mentioned Purina, so i looked and found that Purina has a Calm and Balanced dog food, and I think that is probably what we are testing out.
It has live probiotics, Omega 3 DHA, as well as B-complex vitamins to help a dog be calm. I looked on Amazon, and the 30 lb bag is $87, so I have around $100 just in free dog food.

I mix in a little bit of canned chicken or tuna to add flavor and it softens it a bit for Poodle to eat easier, but it is very small kibble anyway, and he can actually eat it plain also.
Since he is getting old, I like to soften it up a bit for him.

Yvonne Smith said:

We received 4 bags of unmarked dog food, about 10 lbs each, which will last Poodle for months to come. He likes the dog food, and is eating it just fine.

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Cindy used to do that, and the No Kill shelter dogs loved the food, and the shelter loved saving a few bucks. And the cats loved it too, she got 20 pounds of cat food once... And of course, I believe free makes a lot of things taste better.

Bon Appétit, Mr. Poodle!

I have completed the dog food survey , and there is still enough of the dog food for Marco Poodle to have food for several more months. He has even gained some weight with this food, and he really seems to like it.
They did not tell me what it was, but I saw on the bag that it was a Purina product, and it was supposed to have probiotics in it to help be a calming food for stressed dogs.
Poodle is not actually stressed, but he does get excited when we have company, or when we have been gone somewhere and get back home again, and i do think it is helping him to be some calmer, but has also helped with his overall health.

Purina does have a calming dog food, so I think this is what we were testing, and I will buy it for him when I run out of the bags I already have. They sent me four 10 lb bags, and he barely used one of the bags for the 2 months trial, so he is still on his second bag full.
Of course, he also eats along with me, so it is not like he just lives on the dry dog food.

I received the points and have asked for them to be cashed in for amazon gift cards, which takes a month or two for some reason. Since I already had some points from other surveys, I cashed in $400 in Amazon gift cards. I do not know what i will use them for yet, but at least they will be there when I do need to buy something.

Yvonne Smith said:

I do not know what i will use them for yet

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Solar panels, obviously!

There's tons of stuff you could get with $400 on Amazon, my problem with that is Jeff Bezos. I'm not overly inclined to give him any more of my money than I already have. But if I had gift cards that didn't cost me anything but a few clicks on a website (which I do for free most of the time), that changes the whole situation... I loves me some freebies.

Axel Slingerland said:

There's tons of stuff you could get with $400 on Amazon, my problem with that is Jeff Bezos. I'm not overly inclined to give him any more of my money than I already have. But if I had gift cards that didn't cost me anything but a few clicks on a website (which I do for free most of the time), that changes the whole situation... I loves me some freebies.

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I used my gift cards for vitamins, the new yogurt maker, and some other supplement items that I think might help my health, and also bought some for my family.
I enjoy doing the surveys, and the points can be exchanged for gift cards for a lot of other places besides Amazon, other stores and restaurants. But we buy most everything from Amazon now because it is free shipping to the house, so Amazon is the gift card I choose.

There are several survey companies that I do surveys for, so I am always getting a few points, and can cash them in when I need to buy something; so it works good for me all the way around. The major study surveys just come now and then, and I do not always qualify for the respondent they are looking for, but those are nice when they happen, too.

Yvonne Smith said:

There are several survey companies that I do surveys for, so I am always getting a few points, and can cash them in when I need to buy something; so it works good for me all the way around.

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That's what Cindy did, and she averaged $10 to $15 a day doing it. But every once in awhile, she would hit the jackpot. She never got 40 pounds of dog food, but she got 25 pounds once. All from BS answers about a dog we didn't have. I always found that amusing. And the Pound Pups loved it.

Here's an odd one for you. My secondary health insurance is Kern Family Health. And they call you several times a month, and you get a $10 gift card for each call. I chose Walmart because that's where we shop when we can't get something at Costco.

They call and ask you a bunch of stupid questions, and I just sit here giving them one word answers. "Have you any forgotten to take your meds this week?" "No." and such as that. But as Geddy Lee said in the video "Take Off" by Bob and Doug Mckenzie, "$10 is $10"...

We get gift cards from our DEvoted Health advantage plan also, for completing certain medical tests, and those are usually in the form of a gift card that can be used for food or fuel. When we had Humana, they had a program called Go365 which gave points for exercise, like walking, and with a fitness tracker, it automatically reported each days steps for me. Points could be cashed in for gift cards, so both Bobby and I tried hard to make sure we got in our exercise points each day.
Like you said, @Axel Slingerland , $10 is $10, and each little bit helps out.

They might have liked me back when could ride "Ol' Bessie", so named after my great-grandmother.... I rode 10 to 20 miles a day every day for 9 years, and accumulated 30,000 miles. I bought her new for $300 in 2005, 6 years later in 2011 all the components on her were worn out, so I had her rebuilt from the ground up. When I told Cindy that because that bike saved my life, my A1c was 5.5% at the time, smack dab in the middle of the "Coveted 5% Club", I spent $800 to turn this $300 "entry level" bike with 15,000 miles on it into a high performance bicycle, she nearly had a cow. But then she remembered it was my money...

I replaced all of the main components with top of the line Shimano Deore gear. As my favorite Bike Mechanic, Nick, was rebuilding it, a Trek sales rep came in to talk to him. He saw Nick was working on my 2005 Trek Navagator 100 and saw all the empty Shimano boxes on the counter and says, "Who's bike is that?" He pointed at me "It's his. A complete rebuild. The only original part that's left is the Front Fork. The only reason he isn't replacing that is because I couldn't get the RockShox fork he wanted."

He looks at me and says "If it wasn't for the frame, it's going to compare to our top of the line Trek bikes."

I said thanks, and told him "By the way, the components I'm replacing are on the new models of the Navigators. They lasted 15,000 miles." Here she is in all of her glory. She was looking better back in 2015 than now, sitting in my store room, collecting dust...

What an awesome looking bike, @Axel Slingerland ! I have never been the kind of bike rider that you were, but i have always enjoyed riding a bicycle, and miss my 3-speed, which was the last bicycle I owned, back before Bobby and I were married.
I tried one of those 3-wheel adult trikes, but almost dumped it trying to escape from a car that was barreling way too fast down our street. Bobby had to run out, grab the bike to keep it from tipping over and drag me out of the way of the car.
I put it on Craigslist the very next day and sold it to a nice lady who had a safe and quiet place to ride it. If I ever move somewhere that I can ride a 3-wheel trike and be safe, i would really like to have one again.

I am doing a really interesting study survey right now, and it is about fitness tracker watches. They sent me two smart watches and two smart phones that the watches connect with, and a blood pressure cuff.
I wear one watch on each wrist and then change partway through the study, plus take BP measurements each day. This is the most technical study that I have done.
I can’t wear my own fitness watch when I am wearing the study watches , so when I take off the study watches at night, then I wear my own watch over night, so it is still doing the sleep tracking. It isn’t tracking any fitness activities for the day, so I won’t be able to do that until I finish the study and send back the study watches.