Tag Archives: make money

How I’ve Made Ends Meet While Unemployed the Last 6 Months

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While I have applied to 93 jobs and made 150 direct contacts, all of that work doesn’t pay the bills. If you want a longer explanation, join my Patreon, where I talk about creativity, social media, and the things Jenya (my wife) makes.

I am nearing the end of my financial resources. These are the things that have kept me afloat for this long:

  • Patreon – Thank you.
  • Asgard Alaska – If you haven’t visited the website and read about Vikings, I highly recommend doing so. Creativity wise, knowing more about Vikings will give you more experience to draw from. (I’m the writer Ivar.)
  • Bearly Entertaining and StudyFocusBeach – We’re still working on getting this to a profitable place, but if you need some royalty-free background music for your store or you just want some unobtrusive music for events, StudyFocusBeach is the place to start (Like, Comment and Subscribe; it will really help me out). Bearly Entertaining also has a podcast of gentle, fun stories. I’m working on the SEO portion of their website and YouTube channel as well as general web consulting.
  • Kimber’s Safe Haven – My sister’s dog passed away about the same time that someone abandoned 11 cats on her property. Some of them were pregnant, so she’s ended with over 30 cats. To honor Kimber, she decided to pursue opening a pet rescue. Apparently, there is no rescue in Dallas, Oregon. I’ve been working on the gofundme campaign and trying to help with the website, which isn’t ready, yet. There’s also a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, but the YouTube channel isn’t getting much use at the moment.
  • InboxDollars – It’s a pittance for the amount of time I spend on there, but this month I got $100 and that came in handy! I have written about InboxDollars before.
  • Unemployment – Covers the rent and utilities and that’s about it. Still grateful it’s available.

The Paradox of Choice and Me in April 2025

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This article contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and it takes you to Amazon or InboxDollars and you order something or sign up through that link, I will get a small finder’s fee. Whatever you order will not cost you more than what you normally would’ve paid. Not all the links will go to Amazon. Some will go to pages that are a part of our online footprint, including Etsy and Patreon.

Read more: The Paradox of Choice and Me in April 2025

It’s been a while since I read The Paradox of Choice, and the book is packed away somewhere, so I’m not going to get the exact statistics and examples right, but they will be close enough. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz looks at scientific studies involving work insurance offerings. The scientists found that when a workplace offered a few choices in insurance, people would sign up. When the business offered lots of choices, people were less likely to sign up. Businesses would offer 100 different insurance options and a high percentage of people wouldn’t choose any of them, even though the insurance was supposed to be a part of their compensation package. The business saved money this way, and people were left without insurance because they couldn’t process enough information to make a good choice.

Paralysis in Decision Making

One factor in the paralysis in decision making comes from the fear of making the wrong choice. You choose an insurance with a high deductible because it also covers overnight ER visits for free, but you never end up in the ER while have to cover the deductible because of other medical issues. You can’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and many people would rather not make a decision than make a wrong decision.

Everyday Choices

The medical side of it is sort of an extreme example because this paradox of choice occurs any time there are choices to be made, and we make choices from the moment we get up, and sometimes before. Am I going to hit the snooze button? Am I going to hit the snooze button again? What should I wear? What am I going to have for breakfast?

When we go to the store we are faced with an aisle of cereal choices, soup choices, and other food choices. What are we going to get? Will it be the best deal? Do we decide based on per ounce cost or gross cost? Most of us develop routines to avoid having to make all of the decisions all the time. We run on autopilot. We have favorite brands because we refuse to deviate from them, even if another brand would be a better value or offer a better experience. I have my clothes set up, so I can grab the first thing available in the drawer and wear it. I tell myself, no one cares what I’m wearing, why should I?

How Do I Make Money?

However, the one place where I have problems every day is in the decision on what to do. For those who haven’t been following along, I got laid off in January. I had moved to Eugene, December 16, for a job promotion. I was always taught you move to where the job is. I paid the moving expenses, maxing out my credit cards and depleting my savings, and signed a 12-month lease. On January 16, my job told me my position was eliminated. SURPRISE! Now, I have to scramble to figure out how to make money to pay my bills.

The question I’m faced with every moment of every day is “What can I do right now to make money?” There are a lot of options. Unfortunately, they all seem relatively equal in how much I will make and the amount of effort and time they take.

Previous Experience

I have had previous experience in having to make this type of decision back when I had chosen to be a freelancer. At that time, however, I had a steady income from an SEO writing gig that I could do whenever articles were available, and they were available a lot. I paid a lot of bills through that job because I knew I needed to average eight articles a day to meet my financial obligations. I didn’t have insurance or retirement benefits, but I was younger and toward the end I lived in a country where everyone had insurance, citizen or not. Once I had those eight articles written, I could do whatever I wanted, and I didn’t have any monetary pressure on me. They changed their business model during COVID, and now, I don’t have that cash cow anymore.

What Are My Choices?

Here is a quick list, in no particular order, of what I could choose to do to make money today:

These are all things I could work on to theoretically improve my financial standings. Let’s break each choice down.

InboxDollars

Earlier this year, I published an article about InboxDollars and how to use it. Since then, they have changed the way they payout their cash option. It used to be you could cash out every $10 through Paypal. Now, there is a 30-cent fee. It’s hard to make 30 cents at InboxDollars when you’re just doing the minimum. The 30-cent fee doesn’t change if you cash out at higher levels, but you might just want to get a gift card of some sort and avoid the fee altogether. Waiting until you have accumulated $100 to cashout seems like an eternity. In 2024, it took me about six months to make $100 with InboxDollars.

I have found some deals to speed up the process. They offered $50 if I deposited $20 into a Sofi account. The payout isn’t immediate, but it’s better than double my money. I chose Disney stock for my Sofi account, so it’s not like I spent it (unless Disney stock goes below $0).

I’ve been grinding at the games I can download to my smartphone. (I don’t have a plan; it connects to Internet.) The thing is: These are a grind. I can spend all day pushing my finger against the screen thousands of times and only be in the process of making money without having made any actual money. (And I have.)

Golden Hearts Games and Clubs Poker

These are two gambling sites I found at InboxDollars. If I deposited a certain amount of money, I would get more back. (I don’t recall the exact offer, but it was probably something like deposit $20, get $30 back.) I tried it on Golden Hearts Games first because I was relatively new to InboxDollars. I played the games required, got paid out at InboxDollars, and then got paid out at Golden Hearts Games. I go to Golden Hearts Games every day to get my free spin. I play that money on Old School Jacks or Better, and that’s it. When my counter fills up to $50, I get to redeem for cash. (It used to be $25.)

At Clubs Poker, I play the Great Pigsby. This site requires $100 in credits before it will payout. Again, I don’t spend any of my own money. They offer 50 cents a day for games. You have to play those coins before they can go in the redeem pile.

Both sites offer free coins to play with, too. However, if you have a gambling problem, these sites aren’t for you. Personally, I recommend you finding out if these two offers still exist on InboxDollars before signing up through the links I’ve given you.

Write for Penguinate.com

Penguinate.com is my own website and where this article was originally published. I make a few pennies every month from content I’ve already published. The website has never paid for itself, and I need to hit the $100 mark for my first payout. Currently, I am at $20.97, which includes my highest month of December 2021 at $1.06. Looking at these numbers, I should probably just stop writing, at least for my website. But there’s always the possibility that something I write will go viral. All I need is to serve about a million ads to make it to about $83… Still, I keep pulling that one-armed jack that is blog posting.

Publish on Patreon

I have a small and dedicated group of supporters on Patreon. If I wrote more and put it on Patreon would I be able to grow that audience? I’ve written various posts about Patreon. The quick version is: Patreon allows people to support their favorite artists and creators. I would write with the hope that people would want to support us monthly for my writing and Jenya’s plushie creations. I have already added a way for people to get a free month at the $1 to see what the future of Patreon and creativity look like (Valid until June 29, 2025). I will be releasing one post a month and I have them scheduled through June, but I could write more of them for future months.

Plushies on Etsy

Jenya is making some really incredible plushies and putting them on Etsy. There’s this beautiful, vintage-inspired bunny, some bears, and a penguin or two. Do I need to do more work on advertising that shop? The problem is that we can’t charge enough to cover Jenya’s time for her handmade plushies. The bunny took five days to knit and finish. You can’t charge $500 for it. Maybe we need to come up with something else, but that will mean investing time to learn the new thing and money to get the materials to make the new thing. Seriously, though, if you haven’t seen these new plushies, you should head to our Etsy shop now.

Amazon Affiliate

I am an Amazon Affiliate. I’m not going to rehash the information in the very first part of the post to explain what that means for you. What it means for me is that I could write a bunch of posts on products and use the affiliate link to sell those products. I don’t like doing it, but it may be the only way to get people to use those affiliate links. Right now, I use them for my books and some other odds and ends. My mom has been good about ordering things through the links, but it ends up being about $10 every three months.

Look for a Job

Looking for a job has changed, especially since I’m in a place where I don’t have any contacts. It used to be you could go from business to business, drop off a resume, and get an interview. Until recently, an interview was all I needed to get hired.

Now, you need a cover letter and resume for every job that matches the job description word for word. Businesses aren’t even reading them anymore. They run them through “AI,” and if AI is looking for “managed special events” and the resume says “organized fundraisers,” AI will say that the resume doesn’t match the job description and no human being will ever see the resume. (This is because AI isn’t AI; it’s a mathematical algorithm and a series or preprogrammed responses. AI is incredibly complicated, but it hasn’t mastered the learning part of intelligence.) This means that every resume needs to be done again for every job.

It takes me four hours to do this. That four hours does not include the time it takes to find a job on Indeed, where I have to sift through postings for nurses, physical therapists, mechanics, teachers, even though I told Indeed I do not have the qualifications for those jobs. I also have to sift through jobs that don’t offer benefits or don’t pay enough. I’m too old to take a job that doesn’t offer health insurance and retirement. If I take a job at $17 an hour, I’ll need to work 54 hours a week to make ends meet. In the words of Danny Glover, “I’m too old for this…” I have 20 years until I turn 73. I have $10,000 in my retirement account. There’s no way I can afford to take job that doesn’t offer some sort of 401k. Additionally, there’s no reason I should have to work 54 hours a week to afford food, rent, and a modicum of entertainment.

I know there are some people who are perfectly fine with me taking a job for $5 an hour. It’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make. However, those jobs only put me deeper in debt. We gotta do what we gotta do, but f…

Looking for a Job II

I’m sorry. I got distracted. I have had one face-to-face interview for the hours of work that I put into finding a job. There’s no guarantee that if I find and apply for a job that there will be any benefit at all. I will just have wasted my time.

Contract Work

Luckily, I have two contract jobs I love and one I was trying to get away from. (When I took the bank promotion, I was happy with the idea that I would be able to cut down my workload to one job. I guess I should have been specific about which job.) The one job that I have that actually pays per hour is inconsistent, pays $17 per hour, and offers no benefits. The last two weeks, I had no hours. This coming week, I will have between eight and 12 hours. I’m glad I didn’t give it up when I moved, but it’s not a long-term solution, even if I do get my own regular assignment soon.

Working for Asgard Alaska is great. (You should sign up for their newsletter.) I’m helping friends realize their dreams for a Viking village. I’m learning tons about Viking life. The job is super flexible. As long as we have content for two posts a month, I can do the work I want. They pay well, too. It’s not an endless source of wealth, yet. There’s a limit to how much I can write in a year. Still, it’s nice work if you can get it, and I’m glad I have.

I have a new contract with Bearly Entertaining and their related YouTube channel, StudyFocusBeach. (You should subscribe to their YouTube channel.) Again, I’m going to be helping friends, who are helping me by sending work my way.

These three jobs add up to about 50 hours a month. I would need to find another 150 hours of work to start to feel comfortable financially again.

Write a Book

There are two parts to this, and they are very different. I could spend my time writing another book. I have several ideas. I even have a couple started through 4,000 words. I have one book formatted and ready, except it needs a cover. I have another book that needs formatting and a cover. It takes about a week to format. However, writing a book and getting a cover made (which may or may not have a cost, depending on how I do it), do not mean that the book is going to sell. The last book I published sold 10 copies.

I need to learn how to market my books. I do best when I’m able to sell them in person, but best means 10 books in six hours. There’s got to be something that I’m missing in my marketing piece until I find out what that is, I’m going to be stuck pulling the one-armed bandit lever that is book publishing.

DraftKings and FanDuel

I almost forgot about these two gambling sites. You don’t need to deposit any money, just participate in their free contests. They don’t work in all states. Some contests only offer bonus cash that you then need to use to gamble.

On DraftKings, I’m able to do their pools on Sportsbook and whatever they decide to do on their Fantasy site that’s free. On Fanduel, I will get bonus cash and then play their NBA “Everyone Wins” contest. If you have a gambling problem, these sites are not for you.

I haven’t followed any professional sports enough to know who’s going to be good. I do read the articles each site presents for the game I’m playing. It’s mostly like playing the lottery. You may or may not win. One weekend I wound up with $13. There have been several weekends where I ended up with $1. The payouts are almost immediate and go to my Paypal.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that none of these options, outside of the contract work, is guaranteed to make me any money, and my current contract work isn’t enough to live on. Even if I were able to build enough contract work to make $4,000 a month, it wouldn’t be enough to cover health insurance or retirement. So, how do I choose amongst all these things?

Is Making Money the Only Thing?

Of course, another part of being unemployed at home is that I have other choices to make. Do I take out the trash? Do I sit with the cat? Do I go for a walk because it’s sunny out? Do I read the really interesting book that I want to finish? Do I need another cup of coffee? (Probably yes.) Do I help fold the laundry? (Also probably yes.) How much “work” do I have to do to justify spending time with Jenya, my wife? None of these things will make my bank account healthier. Will they help me destress or will I continue to stress because it appears I’m not making the effort to improve my situation? All of these activities break the flow of any other activity I might have been engaged in, but that’s part of the paradox of choice. Any other choice interferes with the choice you’ve currently made.

What about Stress?

Everything that I need to do takes motivation. There’s no habit built, yet, and that means stress can throw me out of planned day of anything. The news, the economy, what’s happening with immigrants, what’s happening with government employees and their unemployment, my vertigo, my cat gets sick, getting turned down for a job, anything that causes the day to go from okay to awful can make it almost impossible for me to write, to apply for jobs or to do much of anything but sit despondently in fear about the future. I can’t move forward on those days when I’m stuck in the Swamps of Sadness. Even on good days, I question if I’m moving forward at all.

What Choice Should I Make?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I can tell you what I generally do when I’m not wallowing in self-defeat and despair about the state of the world and its politicians. I get up, give my cat Greenies, go to my gaming phone, and start grinding for the next level. I get my casino games out of the way and set up my NBA games and pools if available. I go to InboxDollars and try to get my daily goal met. This could mean cycling through 10 or 15 surveys until I make $1 or maybe a little more. I look at Indeed for jobs and save the ones I’m slightly interested in. I have lunch with Jenya. We go for a walk. I come back and try to apply for jobs, but by this time, I’m usually out of motivation. I try to do something productive. I backslide, and it’s time for dinner and a movie. Between 8pm and 9pm, I come back to the laptop hoping for some good news. Between 9 and 10pm, I head for bed where I read. However, throughout the day, I am constantly second-guessing myself and that energy never returns.

How to Make Money with InboxDollars – 2025 Edition

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I looked at my most recent blog post on InboxDollars, and it was woefully out of date. This is an updated post with information that was correct as of Dec. 29, 2024.

InboxDollars is a website that pays its users based on what they do on the site. You can make money with games, magic receipt redemptions, surveys, offers, web searches, Bingo and other promotions. Through December 29, 2024, I had made $199.69. For the time I’ve been on InboxDollars, I made $1009.00. It’s not riches, but it’s not chump change. But how can you make the same or more than I have?

The Daily List

The easiest way to make some small coins is to look at your daily list and complete it. I usually just made it through the first level of completion, which on some days included Answer and Learn, Add a Magic Receipts Deal, Deal of the Day, Daily Games, and Attempt a Survey. Some days, Daily Games is replaced by Earn from Offers. If you complete these five activities, you get the Scratch and Win boost from Answer and Learn, the attempt at a survey, and the Daily Games, and you get the two or three cent bonus from completing those first five objectives. It doesn’t take long to do these activities, and over the course of a month if you do these every day, you’ll have at least 60 cents if nothing else went right.

Answer and Learn is one, multiple choice poll question. Click on the appropriate bubble and you’re done. Click on Deal of the Day from the Daily List; visiting that page is all you have to do.

Magic Receipt Deal

The Magic Receipt Deal is also one click after you get to the appropriate page. Just select one of the deals, any one of the deals, and you’re done as far as the Daily List is concerned.

However, Magic Receipts can offer you much more than just the completion of your Daily List. If you save your receipts from places where you normally shop, you can earn cash back on the things you buy. The store has to be registered with InboxDollars, so most independent shops are out. However, chain grocery stores like Safeway are available.

You’ll need to take a picture of the receipt and upload it to the site. Look for the possible deals available, and choose them. Some deals are so good, you might be able to get the items for free. Just be sure to read the fine print. One year near Halloween, I got paid to get One Hundred Grand chocolate bars from Walgreens. Walgreens had them on sale and the redemption prize for two bars was about two cents more than the bars cost. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice when it does.

Daily and Free Games

I usually choose Solitaire for the Daily Games. They have some other choices, and they’re in the QuickPlay section on the Games page. Basically, you can play until the Scratch and Earn line has flashed and registered your play or until the game tells you that you’ve earned as much Scratch and Earn progress as you’re going to get that day. I usually stop in the shortest time possible, but I have played until I go the warning when I was trying to get through the Scratch and Earn faster.

The other games on this page will allow you to earn money, too. They are time sinks, so you’ll have to grind it out if you want to make any serious coin. Just make sure you’re choosing games that have a bonus with them and that you will enjoy. Also, watch for the time limits involving the various awards.

Earn from Offers

There are a lot of offers on this page, including the game offers. When I’m trying to make a quick cent, I go to the Content Discovery where I find something that allows me to look at an article for one cent. This is the easiest way to fulfill the Daily List requirement. It usually involves three or four clicks and a little time on the web page. Make sure to read the conditions and be ready to click on a second choice if the first one doesn’t pay out.

Attempt a Survey

The surveys are the bugaboo of the entire system because you never know what you’re going to get. Attempting a survey is easy. Find a survey you like and click on the link. The survey gets registered as attempted as soon as you get to the new website.

Completing a survey is much more difficult. You are likely to qualify for one in five surveys or fewer, which means that you’ve spent the time to look at four surveys and answer their preliminary questions only to get kicked back to the InboxDollars site. This will give you more Scratch and Win progress, but it will take up your time. Most surveys don’t pay minimum wage, so it’s important to understand how much time you’re willing to put into getting a $1 and whether 20 cents for five minutes is better than 75 cents for 20 minutes. If you’re just burning daylight, and can do them, it’s mostly no harm no foul.

Scratch and Earn

The Scratch and Win bar across the top is probably the most exciting thing about InboxDollars. As it progresses, it gives you the opportunity to win bonuses (not so great unless you use them) or up to $100. I haven’t won the $100, yet, but I have gotten 12 cents. It’s important not to miss this bar because it will only accumulate to the end, so you need to scratch the card before you earn more progress. I always let this fill up because it seems the best way to win $100. I haven’t done the math, though.

Billy Button

The Billy Button is a search engine add-on that will direct you to possible InboxDollars deals when you are on other web sites. I resisted adding this until a couple of days ago because I don’t want anyone tracking my wed browser history. But the Billy Button is needed if you’re going to complete your Daily task list to the fullest. It’s also useful for the Bingo game.

Web Searches

This is where I stack up the progress bar. There’s a limit to the number of searches you can do a day, but that’s okay. Searches not only fill up the Scratch and Win progress bar, they also can give you a bonus if you complete enough days in a row. If I need to search something, I go to InboxDollars first.

Bingo Game

Every month or so, InboxDollars has a Bingo game. It’s listed under the More tab. You’ll get a small amount of money for visiting sites from the InboxDollars Bingo board page and completing that line. You’ll get more money the more squares you fill. Another line is activating the Billy Button at certain websites. Completing a search, redeeming offers, and logging into the InboxDollars App are some of the other items that get listed.

Get Others to Join

Another way to earn money is to get others to join using your Refer Friends code. You’ll get a bonus if they make a certain amount of money in a short time frame, and you’ll get a 10 percent stipend based on what they make. Obviously, if you could 100 active people to make $10 a month, you’d get $100 a month. I haven’t gotten there, yet, but maybe you will!

Make Money Online with InboxDollars

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On May 31, 2022, I signed up to make money online with InboxDollars. On August 1, I had made $100 by doing surveys, playing (mostly) solitaire, receiving PaidEmails, using the InboxDollars search engine, and uploading some very small Magic Receipts. I took advantage of one offer to see how it worked. With my two referrals also earning money, it only took me a little over 63 days. That’s about $1.60 a day. It won’t pay the bills, but if I’m making that in my spare time, it’s not too shabby.

Referrals to Make Money Online with InboxDollars

When you sign up with my referral link, I get a 30% bonus based on your activity. If you make a dollar, I get 30 cents, and more importantly, you get your whole dollar. The money doesn’t come from your account. Obviously, I want you to make as much as possible, but even a couple cents a day goes in the pot and contributes to the $10 minimum withdrawal currently on my account. Once you’re signed up, you get your own referral link that you can send to family and friends. You’ll get a 30% bonus based on their activity. (I’ll get nothing but a percentage of what you earn through activity, at least as far as I understand it.) Referrals are obviously the easiest way to make money because once they’re signed up and working, you don’t have to do anything.

Using Offers

I’m always skeptical of offers that seem too good to be true. However, because I had a good experience so far, I thought I would try one out. One of my PaidEmails had an offer for Golden Hearts. The website has a small number of casino slots and other games to play. The offer was to donate $10 and you’d get $15 from InboxDollars. That’s Golden Heart’s shtick. The money goes to a charity of your choosing. Did I have $10 to lose? Education isn’t free, so I thought I could make it up on other activities if something went wrong, like I clicked on the wrong link. I got my $15 from InboxDollars about a week later, maybe a little longer. Even better, the coins I got from Golden Hearts had me at $10.82, which means I made my money back twice!

Golden Hearts offers its members the opportunity to spin, once every 24 hours, for more bonus coins. As long as you remember to visit the site once a day after the hour you first spun the wheel, you’ll be able to continue to play whatever casino game catches your fancy on the site and win more money. (If for some reason, you don’t want to sign up through InboxDolllars, use this referral link. But seriously, you should sign up through InboxDollars.)

Other Parts of InboxDollars

I’ve already covered a lot of the others to make money online with InboxDollars in a previous article. If you’re looking to supplement your income and have a little fun doing it, InboxDollars provides a way. In their July 2022 break down of site statistics, InboxDollars reports that the most made from surveys by one person was around $366. One member made over $2,000 through offers, and someone made $670 from referrals!

All the information I have written is true as far as my experience. This article contains referral links as explained above.

How to Make Money Online at DraftKings

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You can make money online at DraftKings, even if you aren’t a sports fan. DraftKings is a sports betting website that allows users to put money on their favorite teams. You do NOT have to wager any cash, however, to play their free games and win money, prizes, and DraftKings Dollars. Free games are just like their betting games, but they are FREE.

What’s the catch? DraftKings wants you to play the free games, so that you’ll be interested in betting on another game. Most free games have a sponsor that wants you to buy their product; these games provide a soft-sell for them. Some sponsors will ask for your email. Those are the catches, along with the ones in the real sports games.

How do you as a (non)-sports fan make money? Let’s break it down.

Daily Fantasy Sports Vs. Sportsbook

DraftKings offers two ways to play, and the betting portions may or may not be available depending on your state’s laws. Daily Fantasy Sports, or DFS, is what a lot of people play. It’s been described as Dungeons and Dragons for jocks. You pick a set of players from different teams in an attempt to get the highest score for the game. Your score is based on the statistics (stats) your players accumulate during a live game. If you have more points than the other players playing the same game, you win. Some games pay out to the top 50% players. Some pay out only to the top 10. It just depends on the rules set forth by the sponsor. Do not be intimidated. Think of it like the lottery. You’re picking numbers and hoping they’ll come up.

Every game where you select players will have the player’s position, name, average fantasy output, and cost. You have a budget that you cannot exceed when choosing your team. Your job, in the beginning and absent of any analysis, is to choose players who have the highest average output for the least amount of money. Depending on the contest, you may need to have a certain number of players who qualify for certain positions. You won’t have to know what the positions are or what the abbreviations stand for. You just need to choose a team.

With Sportsbook Pools, you pick a set of teams to win their games (or cover the spread), or answer a series of questions about who you think will do what. Some of these Pools aren’t even sports related. They’ve had pools about TV shows, the weather, and other random fun topics of popularity.

Don’t worry about the jargon if you’re new to sports or betting. For your first pick ‘em games, you’ll just want to pick who you think will win. Since these are free, you won’t even have to worry about winning or losing. It’s all about crossing your fingers and hoping those metaphorical ping pong balls come up the right way.

DK Dollars and Crowns

While DraftKings does offer free games that provide real dollars, they also offer DK Dollars and Crowns. These you can only use on the site. Crowns you can convert into betting capital, and DK Dollars are equivalent to real dollars. This is what is known as house money. You can use it for any games you’re eligible to play as long as there is no restriction on the game you choose. You don’t have to use them, but if you don’t they will sometimes disappear because they have an expiration date.

Increase Your Chances

If you don’t want to just plug in random players, you can study the game to increase your figurative chances of winning. You will have to learn the game you’re interested in, like football or basketball. At least, you’ll need to learn the jargon used for the sports.

Once you know some of the jargon, you can click on the research tab at DraftKings and find out what the experts are saying about who to choose. For the NFL, you’ll need to know what week they are currently in. For the NBA and MLB, you’ll need to know what day it is that your games take place. Then you can try to use the experts’ opinions to create a roster.

You can even look at YouTube to find some people talking about the picks and why they choose them. Of course, even the experts get the picks wrong. Sometimes, injuries will knock your players out of the games. That’s all part of DFS sports.

The Spread

When people talk about “the spread” in betting, they are referring to the number of points a team needs in order for a win to count as a win. Winning outright isn’t enough. Teams need to win by a certain number of points. For example, the Bills are seven-point favorites against the Jaguars. If you bet the spread and say the Bills are going to win, the Bills would need to score seven or more points than the Jaguars. If the Bills win the game by three points, you lose the bet. By the same token, if you take the Jaguars to win, and they lose by three, you still win the bet because they lost by fewer than seven points. When looking at the spread, a minus sign before the number indicates that the team is favored to win by that many points. (It’s confusing until you get used to it. Apparently, the guy, Charles McNeil credited with inventing the spread was a mathematician.)

With the free pick ‘em games, I don’t worry about the spread too much. I just try to guess the winner and hope they cover the spread (win by enough points for the bet to payout).

How to Find Free Games

When you log on to DraftKings Daily Fantasy, you’ll need to make sure you’re in the Lobby. A list of upcoming games will load, and you can click on “entry fee.” It should sort out from low (free) to high. If it’s free, click on the enter button and try choosing.

When logging on to DraftKings Sportsbooks, find the “Pools” tab and click on it. There will be a list of pools you may enter in.

Why Play DFS?

Sports is a huge part of American life. It’s a light topic that most people won’t get too upset about, and if it can help you connect with someone else, you might want to learn about it. I learned to love basketball my freshman year in college, so I could live in harmony with my roommate. I didn’t realize how important it would be as I went through life meeting other sports fans. Daily Fantasy Sports offers a way into the sport of your choice while giving you something else to think about and learn.

This article contains my referral links. If you decide to play for real money (of at least $20) on DraftKings, we both will get a betting allowance of DK Dollars. Really, I’d rather hear that you won a free contest than have a DraftKings allowance for games. There are other Daily Fantasy Sports sites. FanDuel and Yahoo! are a couple of others that I will likely explore in the near future.

I wrote this article because the following articles got a lot of response. They were liked, viewed, and some people subscribed to my blog because of them. Apparently, everyone wants to know how to make money online. I want to share the… cents… wealth is taking it too far at this point.

My Golden Hearts Journey So Far

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I joined Golden Hearts through InboxDollars (referral link) because InboxDollars said they would give me $15 if I donated $10 to a charity through the Golden Hearts website. I thought I would take a chance because getting 50% interest over a month is loan shark-type money. There were a couple of other conditions I had to meet to qualify for the $15, but I don’t remember them now. At any rate, I satisfied the conditions and got my $15, which means they paid me $5 to give me the coins I used at Golden Hearts!

What Is Golden Hearts?

Golden Hearts (referral link to Golden Hearts; use the one for InboxDollars instead) is an online casino where you can donate money to a charity listed on their site and get coins to play their games, including several varieties of slots, bingo, and Jacks or Better. I made my $10 donation to International Penguin & Marine Mammal Foundation Inc. Then I played Jacks or Better.

Jacks or Better

I chose Jacks or Better because I basically understand how the game is played, and it gives me a feeling of control. I get to decide which cards I throw away and which I keep. (Once, when I was rushing through the play, I threw away two pairs. My bad.) Slots and Bingo don’t allow you any sort of control, you just get to watch numbers come up on the screen.

In the beginning, it went really well. I was winning a lot of small prizes. In fact, with my first $10, I won over $10, which means the $10 I donated to charity turned into $25 total for me. The site charges a 50-cent fee to redeem any winnings under $25, so I decided to let it ride. I was going for that $25. After all, I had done really well, so far.

The Gambler’s Story

This is where the typical gambling story takes a turn for the worst. Winning streaks come to an end; doesn’t that mean losing streaks do, too? I knew I could win with Jacks or Better, so I kept playing and I started losing. I’ve gone five days without a win.

The good news is that my cash balance hasn’t declined; it continues to sit above $12. How is this possible?

The Golden Hearts Bonus

Every day, Golden Hearts gives its players a free spin on its bonus wheel. The coins come out from 75 to 2500, and they don’t cost anything. I’ve been using only these to play games on Golden Hearts. When they’re gone, I go back to my other Internet activities. I have to be disciplined and not fall for the winning streak trap; as long as I do, I’m playing with house money.

Know When to Fold Them

I don’t know how long it will take me to reach $25, but even if I quit right now, I will have made $17 profit – $5 from InboxDollars and $12 from Golden Hearts (as of August 10, 2022). If gambling online is something you choose to do, I recommend going through InboxDollars to get to Golden Hearts. Just remember to never bet more than you can afford to lose.

 “The National Council on Problem Gambling operates the National Problem Gambling Helpline Network (1-800-522-4700). The network is a single national access point to local resources for those seeking help for a gambling problem. The network consists of 28 call centers that provide resources and referrals for all 50 states, Canada, and the US Virgin Islands. Help is available 24/7 and is 100% confidential.”

https://www.ncpgambling.org/help-treatment/national-helpline-1-800-522-4700/

This article contains referral links to InboxDollars, where you can make money online. (Check out this article to learn more.) All information presented was true at the time of writing to the best of my knowledge.

Make Money Online with InboxDollars

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On May 31, 2022, I signed up to make money online with InboxDollars. On August 1, I had made $100 by doing surveys, playing (mostly) solitaire, receiving PaidEmails, using the InboxDollars search engine, and uploading some very small Magic Receipts. I took advantage of one offer to see how it worked. With my two referrals also earning money, it only took me a little over 63 days. That’s about $1.60 a day. It won’t pay the bills, but if I’m making that in my spare time, it’s not too shabby.

Referrals to Make Money Online with InboxDollars

When you sign up with my referral link, I get a 30% bonus based on your activity. If you make a dollar, I get 30 cents, and more importantly, you get your whole dollar. The money doesn’t come from your account. Obviously, I want you to make as much as possible, but even a couple cents a day goes in the pot and contributes to the $10 minimum withdrawal currently on my account. Once you’re signed up, you get your own referral link that you can send to family and friends. You’ll get a 30% bonus based on their activity. (I’ll get nothing but a percentage of what you earn through activity, at least as far as I understand it.) Referrals are obviously the easiest way to make money because once they’re signed up and working, you don’t have to do anything.

Using Offers

I’m always skeptical of offers that seem too good to be true. However, because I had a good experience so far, I thought I would try one out. One of my PaidEmails had an offer for Golden Hearts. The website has a small number of casino slots and other games to play. The offer was to donate $10 and you’d get $15 from InboxDollars. That’s Golden Heart’s shtick. The money goes to a charity of your choosing. Did I have $10 to lose? Education isn’t free, so I thought I could make it up on other activities if something went wrong, like I clicked on the wrong link. I got my $15 from InboxDollars about a week later, maybe a little longer. Even better, the coins I got from Golden Hearts had me at $10.82, which means I made my money back twice!

Golden Hearts offers its members the opportunity to spin, once every 24 hours, for more bonus coins. As long as you remember to visit the site once a day after the hour you first spun the wheel, you’ll be able to continue to play whatever casino game catches your fancy on the site and win more money. (If for some reason, you don’t want to sign up through InboxDolllars, use this referral link. But seriously, you should sign up through InboxDollars.)

Other Parts of InboxDollars

I’ve already covered a lot of the others to make money online with InboxDollars in a previous article. If you’re looking to supplement your income and have a little fun doing it, InboxDollars provides a way. In their July 2022 break down of site statistics, InboxDollars reports that the most made from surveys by one person was around $366. One member made over $2,000 through offers, and someone made $670 from referrals!

All the information I have written is true as far as my experience. This article contains referral links as explained above.

How to Make Money Online with InboxDollars

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July 1, 2022 – I did a web search to find out how to make money online, and InboxDollars came up. I decided that the worst thing that could happen was I would get spammed or not get paid, so I joined on May 31. In about one month’s time, I’ve made almost $25. It’s not going to pay the bills, but an extra $25 comes in handy. I’m still exploring the sight, but here are some suggestions that could help you earn more if you decide to join. (Use my referral link above. It doesn’t cost you anything. When you earn rewards, I also earn rewards. More on the referral system below.)

Playing Games

The first thing that caught my eye about making money online with InboxDollars was that I could do so by playing solitaire! I figured I play enough point and click games that give me nothing beyond the satisfaction of doing well and seeing Disney characters interact with the park I built (in Disney Magic Kingdoms). A couple of games of solitaire a day for a little cash would be a little more productive.

Can you really make money playing solitaire? Yes, you can, but only indirectly and don’t expect it to buy you coffee. Basically, as you play Solitaire, Mahjongg Dimensions or one of the other games, your progress bar fills up. When the bar gets to the first dollar sign symbol, you get a scratch card for up to $10. Don’t play it. The second dollar symbol on the progress bar gets you a scratch-it for up to $25. However, the real winner is the third dollar symbol, which gives you a scratch-it for up to $100. It’s the last one that I wait for, and I generally win between a nickel and nine cents. If playing these games is all you do, you’re still pulling in a nickel when you fill up the bar (depending on what scratch-it you go for.)

Games are probably the hardest way to make any money, but if you’re playing solitaire, three match, or word games anyway, you may as well hook yourself up with the opportunity for $100. If you have a smartphone, there are other game opportunities with better rewards.

The Daily List

As long as you have decided to make money online with Inbox Dollars by playing games, you should really maximize your efforts. Start everyday by checking out the Daily List and doing the simple tasks they have there. Answer and Learn is the daily poll that requires you to answer one question. Add a Magic Receipts Offer requires nothing more than for you to choose something to add to your grocery list; you can remove it later. Visit the Deal of the Day and any other pages they may have in the list. These are easy pickings, and if you do five of them, you get a bonus. Do all of them and you get a second bonus.

Make Your Daily Goal

Your Daily Goal will vary from day to day. In order to achieve the Daily Goal, you must earn a certain amount of money each day. Sometimes, it can be 30 cents; sometimes, it’ll be more. Whatever it is, you get a bonus every day, and if you keep a streak going, you’ll get larger bonuses as the month goes on – as much as $3. The Daily Goal is relatively easy to attain if you do the right surveys, but a foray into the Offers area can also get you to the goal on some days.

Take a Survey

The surveys are where you can rack up your money total. The surveys section lists a number of surveys with the amount they are worth and the approximate time the survey will take. It’s important to note that you will not qualify for every survey. In fact, some estimates say you will qualify for about one in five or 20% of the surveys that you click on. Also, some of the surveys will cycle you through three or four qualifying survey pages before you actually take the survey. You may also run into surveys that you seem to have completed, but they never bring you back to InboxDollars. It’s frustrating, but it’ll be better if you don’t get too angry about it.

Find an Offer

InboxDollars has 100 percent free offers. Many of these offers are related to games that you can download to your smartphone and play to a certain level in a certain timespan. Some of them are point and click quizzes that take you multiple web pages while asking questions about which picture matches which.

Perhaps, the most important of these 100 percent free offers are the Click and Earn and Explore and Earn. With these offers, you get between one and four cents for your click or clicks. These links will take you to another page that will send you to the actual place where you can get credit for your effort. While the amount of pennies you can pick up this way varies, it has helped me to make my daily goal on numerous occasions. I have found that I need to go through these pages all at once rather than try to get them in separate sessions. If you see a penny, click it up!

Do a Search

Searches are a great way to earn progress points. This is the information they are looking for, and they are willing to boost your winning potential to get it. Of course, they want a natural search, so it helps if you know what you are looking for. Start with InboxDollars instead of one of the other search engines, and you’ll be able to fill your progress bar. (This is an especially good idea for authors or people who need to search for info because of their job.)

Upload Receipts

Magic Receipts allow you to upload your grocery receipts and make money online with InboxDollars. You need to pick out the Magic Receipts offers related to your grocery receipt and add them to your list. When you get to the list, you need to click on them again. Every receipt is worth a couple of cents. But the price can go up depending on what you buy. Deals can and do change, so it’s important to know what you are looking for.

Because you have a 14-day window to upload receipts, I generally wait until the last possible moment to do so. My Magic Receipts are a last-ditch effort to meet my daily goal.

Paid Emails

Paid emails are another way to drastically increase your progress bar. The email comes to your personal email, click on it and you get progress toward a Scratch and Win. The emails are also in the messages section of InboxDollars.

Refer a Friend

If you have the kind of friends who like to play games online or do surveys, the Refer Friend link will help you increase your earnings. As of this writing, you can make 30% of whatever your friends make when they do activities. For every dollar they earn, you get 30 cents. It doesn’t cost them anything other than their time.

With all of the activities available to make money online with InboxDollars, there is certainly a way to help you supplement your income. Join today with my referral link, and we’ll both be enriched!