McWilliams’ World

All done. I’ve pretty much tapped all available, decent offers. My last attempt is another $500 AmEx gift card from TrustedRewards.com (a Brandarama site). Only 3 offers but I took some risk trying to complete it. I did a Disney movie club (can ship back my initial order to cancel), Zomba – a book club, and a Cookbook club. All similar in requirements. Obviously I’m taking a greater financial risk with these as I’m having to dole out $10 -  $15 per sign-up; but I should be able to recoup that if i decide not to continue with these programs.

So all in all, I’ve potentially have over $3200 worth of freebies, with maybe an investment of less than $100 and some patience and diligence. Not too shabby.

FYI… My FusionCash account is now up to $60 and climbing. I’m still expecting another $20 – $40 to be credited withing the week.

Well, I just started my FusionCash.com excursion. You basically sign up at a ton of places for cash. You can do offers which are typically free or require a small purchase - but the kick-back is greater (typically $5-$20), or do email based sign-ups for free and typically get $1-$5 for each sign-up.

Within my first hour, I racked up about $35. This morning I spent another hour or two and now have over $55 banked (and climbing – I had to adjust the amount during the writing of this post) and a additional estimated $50+ on the way (assuming that the other offers are credited). Not to bad for 2-4 hours worth of clicking.

Want to get started? Good! It’s fairly easy.

Here’s my suggestions:

1. Follow my link and sign-up. It’s my referral link. You’re helping me by helping you get started. You loose nothing.
   * Tip: You’ll want to use an alternative email address as most of the sign-ups are email based and you’ll probably get a ton o’ spam. I have my own domain name so I just use a new email address each time I sign up – easy way to keep track of where stuff coming from. Use a good spam filter – I use SpamBayes on Outlook.
2. In order to confirm your account you need to click link in the email confirmation you’ll get AND eventually do a Phone confirmation. An automated system will call you and prompt you to enter a code to confirm your account. This helps prevent against fraud.
3. Once you’re confirmed,  you can start banging out the offers.
   * Tip: Remember, the free trials and offers that you need a CC for will pay out the most. But you can quickly blow through 30+ “survey” sites fairly quickly
4. Keep track of your emails; especially if you did any trial offers
5. Since most offers are instant you should start seeing cash pile up in your account in no time.
   * Tip: If some offers don’t credit immediately, be patient, it could take up to a week – or not at all. Check FusionCash’s FAQ for more info on that.
6. To get more cash…refer people using your referral link. Post on-line, forum signatures (if it’s allowed), and post banners on your site – check FusionCash for free banners.

That’s pretty much it. With in a few hours you’ll wrack up a good wad of cash. Once you’re ready to cash-out, you can request a check, direct deposit, or PayPal. So far I’m pretty impressed. What are you waiting for?! Get started!

Yep! That’s right! The time for Brandarama to update accounts!

So my latest freebie: A $500 AmEx Gift Card (only 3 offers) is complete and I’ll be mailing off my certificate tomorrow. Yeee haw!

This weekend I’ll be diggin’ into FusionCash to start banking some cash to pay off my GoDaddy.com hosting package. From what I can see, I should be able to rack up about $50+ in no time flat.

[update: in simlilar news
My $1000 Visa gift card is scheduled to be shipped!]

I took the opportunity to take a a few days off work to extend the 4th of July to a 5 day vacation. It felt good to get away from the office for a while.

So what the heck did I do? Yeah, I played some Xbox. Watched a few movies. Started prepping our driveway to get sealed (which it desperately needs). Started a video project with the kids (more on that at a later date). Went to see the fireworks. But mostly chilled out.

I will say I had the best time yesterday with Jonah (my 10 year old). We’ve been slogging our way through the Halo series on Legendary (the hardest difficulty level). We were stuck on a level for a while but we muscled our way through it with some strategy. Once we made it through we were screaming and bouncing around. What a rush! Then we managed to make it through another level which also broke out in celebration. What a great time! I’m pretty proud of his skills.

I managed to whip up a few more offers over at YourFree360Games.com and get my order in for Too Human. That went fast. It took less than 2hr for the offers to report back complete and I had it ordered.

My freebie line up looks as such:

• Waiting to go ”complete”:
  • $100 EB/Gamestop gift card (2x)
  • $50 EB/Gamestop gift card
  • 12mo Xbox Live card + $50 EB/Gamestop gift card
• Completed:
  • Xbox Live Arcade: Unplugged (on it’s way)
  • Xbox 360 wireless controller (2x)
  • Mass Effect (ordered)
  • Too Human (ordered)

 Woo! That’s a lot of stuff. Granted I paid a few bucks for trial’s and such but the return is great. I have a feeling that for two of the giftcards I’m going to have to request manual credit – which sucks since it only extends the wait. I’m pretty much done with available offers at YourFree360Games.com. I’ve exhausted most of the decent ones. I’ll have to hold off on that for a while now.

Well, back to work.

I managed to get the necessary 2500 tickets from club.live.com and order my Xbox 360/Windows controller. The notice confirming my gift selection stated 6-8 weeks for delivery. How about less than 1 week and via FedEx ground. Wow that was fast and the controller works like a charm. Now I have a USB dongle for my PC if I ever (read: “never”) need to use my 360 controller on my PC.

I also received another 360 wireless controller from my favorite free game site: youfree360games.com. We now have 4 controllers total between the two 360′s we have. No more fighting over controllers. Pretty cool.

In other news

We scored another month of Blockbuster Total Access; this time free (last time I paid $10). I’m telling you, if you want movies and have a near by Blockbuster, you’ll have movies coming out your ears! Get three out on-line, receive those, take them back to the store and get 3 more movies – free! It’s pretty quick turn-around as well. Although I will say that Netflix is VERY fast as I’m did a trial as well and even though they don’t have a storefront, turn-around time is speedy.

I have to move my stuff out of my old office in Oshkosh as the IT department is shifting seating around. I’m now working in Neenah due to a huge project Bemis is working on and I’m part of the team. I also took the opportunity to ask for some new stuff; a new monitor (hopefully a nice 19″ LCD) and Adobe CS3: Web Premium. Hopefully it gets approved.

I bought NBA Street Homecourt the other day from GameFly.com for about $30. I’m about ready to trade in the original Xbox as we’re barely playing it any more as well as any non-backwards compatible games. I hope GameStop’s still running their console trade-in deals. Homecourt is pretty fun. I’m not much of a sports game player (I did enjoy NFL Street 2), but Homecourt is quite fun with some very over-the-top dunks and double-dunks; Yes, double-dunks. The games achievements are a bit weak as there’s only 16, and the game sports some internal “awards” which I thought was odd. But whatever, it’s a fun play.

Well, it’s been a while since my last post; lots to talk about but not a lot of time or ambition to post.

I started a new “free-spree” this week. I found a few new sites (actually run by the same company I did my other cards through) offering gift cards – mostly $100. So I started two $100 EBGames gift cards, and one $50 EBGames gift card. The $100 cards require two offers – pretty easy and the $50 card needs just one. It’ll be about 12weeks before I see them. Hopefully I don’t have to deal with manual credits as that only extend the wait.

I did start a $500 / 2 offer gift card at rewardscity.com (not linking) but after a week or so, I noticed they updated their terms and now it says 4 offers and it doesn’t report my offers I completed. So I’m guessing this site is bad news. Oh well. You live and learn. Avoid at all costs.

I’m also waiting for my 1600 Xbox Live Marketplace Points from Xbox360Acheiver.com. I stared a Blockbuster Total Access trial (if you want movies and also have a local Blockbuster – you’ll have movies coming out of your ears!) and haven’t heard anything from them yet and it’s been nearly 3 weeks. I’ve shot about 4 messages in to them asking what’s up with no reply. This is odd since I did an offer through them before and within days I had the points. Grrr!

Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it…

[Update]

Oops forgot to mention that I’m also doing club.live.com where you can play games for “tickets” which you can redeem for items such as ringtones, Xbox faceplates, controllers, a Zune, even an Xbox 360 (about 35000 tickets – man that’s a lot of games). After about a week or so I have around 1700 tickets. I’m shooting for the Xbox controller which is 2500. I should be able to redeem it within another week. 

Just wanted to post my proof of my receipt of Rainbow Six: Vegas from YourFree360Games.com.

Frequent readers of this site know that I’ve done a number of freebie sites receiving items such as Xbox 360s (yes I got two free), $1000 gift cards (yep, two of those too), and a slew of Xbox 360 games (just check the Free Stuff or Free Xbox 360 categories out).

Recently I did an offer for PosterPass.com. The deal was get 4 posters for $2 each. It was a subscription based offer but you had the first month to try it out, cancel at any time.

I signed up and about a week later my posters arrived in the mail. Cool.  A few days later I called up and canceled my account as I don’t have a need (nor the wall space) to be getting posters every month. No problem… Until I was doing bills the other night and noticed the charge from PosterPass come through on my credit card; $39!!! What the hell?! I called up the next day and asked why I was charged when the initial sign-up stated $9.95. The terms only state that a small shipping and handling fee will be applied. I don’t think it costs $30 to ship 4 posters. The lady on the other end stated that it was a “subscription fee”. What?! You mean I have to pay just to subscribe? I sated that I never would have signed up had I read that or saw that during checkout (which is not stated anywhere). She offered to refund me once I send my posters back, which I am doing ASAP.

As I’ve said, I’ve done a ton of offers. I’ve only got burned once (by my own stupidity – didn’t read the terms, but I was lucky enough to claim ignorance and the charge was reversed). This offer was deceptive all the way through and I’ve alerted the guys at yourFree360Games.com about it.

So be careful when doing offers for freebie sites. Keep all communications. Save a copy of the terms and your order. Keep track of trial times. Read over everything before hitting that “finalize order” button and 9 times out of 10 you’ll be safe.