MAKE MONEY FROM HOME? : NOT FROM SURVEYS

Being unemployable these days I have been looking for ways to make some money. I subscribe to “martins money tips”, an email from the consumer guy from GMTV. One email had an article on making money from home and suggested trying filling out surveys online: so I did. Frankly, it turned out to be a massive waste of time. Most of them suggest that you can earn around ten English pounds per month so I subscribed to a dozen. The companies involved were:

Valued opinions (pays cash), My survey (awards points), Toluna (points), Honest Rewards ( cash), Paid surveys 4me (points, I think), Wonderbug (points), Harris (Vouchers), IPSOS (points), Global test market (can’t remember), Opinion Outpost (points), Consumer opinion ( can’t remember), Springboard ( points), Maximiles (points). I may have got some of these wrong, as I have unsubscribed from them all and I am going on memory. Some of them send you several surveys a day. That’s ideal, you may think, until you answer ten or more qualifying questions after which you are told you are screened out of the survey. Others send one a day and chuck you out less often but offer small rewards. Finally there are the more infrequent ones, every few days or once a week or less. The cash incentive per survey is fifty pence or a pound usually. To get  vouchers  requires a lot of points, and I never got anywhere near earning enough for a reward.

After one month I reached the redemption target on ONE survey site, IPSOS. On all the others I was miles away from the required target. I wasted so many hours filling in surveys, some of which were absolutely mind numbingly boring. If you get a topic you like, for me that was technology, television, even the supermarket ones were ok, but some of them are about a certain product, a breakfast cereal, snack, which can be quite boring. Then you have the survey format to deal with. Some are very user friendly, nicely designed and offer you choices in the answers that are easy to pick from. Others look gaudy and leave you feeling frustrated by the lack of opportunity to say exactly what you want to. Some are very repetitive which annoyed me. To go through all that for precious little was a big waste of my time. I opted to send my Argos voucher earned at IPSOS to my son as it was his birthday. When it was arranged a message appeared on screen telling me it would take eight weeks to be delivered. EIGHT WEEKS! What a rip off!

I also noticed that I was suddenly getting a lot of spam from when I began doing surveys. There was definitely a connection between the two because now that I have stopped doing the surveys I have stopped getting the spam.

I guess we stop at homes must accept that society is woefully short of being able to provide decent work from home. We will just have to go on getting state benefits and living off the people who can work. I don’t know about the rest of you disabled people out there, but I don’t like being a scrounger. I want to contribute.