If you are a Bank of America customer, you can get free admission to select museums on certain dates by showing your Bank of America credit or debit card and a photo ID. The eligible dates for 2009 are currently the first full weekend of each month through September, although their website says that more 2009 dates are to come. Full details on the program can be found on their Museums on Us(R) website.
Archive for the ‘Freebies’ category
Free Museum Admissions from Bank of America
April 14th, 2010Free Popular Mechanics 1-year Subscription
January 12th, 2010Here’s an easy freebie to start your day. You can get a free 1-year subscription to Popular Mechanics magazine by signing up at RecycleBank. There is no cost to sign up and when you do you will receive 100 reward points automatically, which can be redeemed for the subscription. If Popular Mechanics isn’t your thing, you can choose one of the other subscriptions listed below instead.
Popular Mechanics 1-year Subscription — 100 points
Esquire One-year subscription — 80 points
Good Housekeeping One-year subscription — 80 points
Bazaar One-year subscription — 80 points
Marie Claire One-year subscription — 80 points
Redbook One-year subscription — 60 points
Seventeen One-year subscription — 80 points
Town & Country One-year subscription — 100 points
Snuggie: The Blanket that Steals?
July 14th, 2009We all know and love the Snuggie, that cool blanket with the sleeves sewn in that is a mainstay of the cable TV commercial circuit. We have a Snuggie ourselves and they are as cool as the actors in the commercial make them seem, and yes you do look like a monk when you have it on like the commercial too. But all is not well in Snuggie land, at least according to the folks at MainStreet.com.
According to their story, consumers that bought the Snuggie through the TV offer have been receiving “rebate” checks in the mail for $8.95. However, we you read the fine print you see that by cashing or depositing the check you are enrolled in a program called Great Fun, and if you don’t cancel within 30 days you will be charged for a year’s membership at a rate of $149.99. Unfortunately many Snuggie owners didn’t see that fine print and end up getting charged the membership fee for a service they weren’t even aware they were enrolling in. The practice isn’t illegal (long distance companies did this for years where by cashing a check you were agreeing to switch service, and other programs have used similar tactics), but it certainly qualifies as sneaky and makes a lot of folks irate.
For my longtime readers, you probably recognized the name Great Fun. In fact, Great Fun is a program run by Trilegiant Corporation, who I have posted about in the post Rape and Pillage Trilegiant for Free Gift Cards back in 2007. Yes, you can get tons of free money and gift cards by signing up for their trial offers and cancelling in the trial period. Just work the system in moderation, as they seem to be catching on a lot more quickly to those of us who are gaming the system for free stuff. However, if you do it right you can end up with hundreds of dollars in free gift cards and rebate checks for only the effort of signing up and calling to cancel the service.
Free 8×10 print at Walgreens – Today only
May 6th, 2009To all my readers, let me start with my apologies for the lack of updates recently. As I’ve alluded to before, I am an accountant and work in the financial reporting function of a large publicly-traded corporation. That means that my office is crazy busy in the few weeks leading up to whenever we release earnings, which is once a quarter. Thankfully we have made it past the first quarter 2009 earnings release, which temporarily inches my life back towards sanity until we start this all over again shortly after the July 4th holiday.
Anyway, until I get back in the posting groove let me pass along this fun freebie. Today (5/6/09) only at Walgreens you can get a free 8×10 print, either by bringing in your memory card and ordering the print in-store 0using the coupon in the weekly ad, or by ordering online with the promo code “MOTHER” and selecting to pick it up in the store.
Walgreens prints aren’t usually the best quality in my experience, but it is hard to get better than free.
Free Suze Orman Book Download (thru 1/15/2009)
January 8th, 2009I’ve never read any of her books, however you certainly can’t beat the price. To promote an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, you can download a PDF copy of Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan. The download will be available until midnight Central time on the evening of 1/15/2009. Get it while you can!
Frugal Funds Update: Got my UPromise earnings and more free money from Trilegiant!
February 8th, 2008More money to add to my running “Frugal Funds” total. We got our UPromise earnings checks yesterday, which represent all of the earnings we have had in the program to date. I had $62.96 in earnings and my wife had $10.93. Less the two stamps to send in the withdrawal requests, we earned $73.07 for purchases we would have made anyway.
A common misconception about the program is that you have to put the money into a 529 plan, but that isn’t the case. See my previous post on how to withdraw your earnings in the form of a check. The program pays you for purchases of select products and from select retailers, which is tracked through either your credit card or store loyalty cards. The program is super easy and you can sign up by clicking the UPromise logo in the left sidebar.
I also had two more checks of free money from Trilegiant, one for $15 (Q4 grocery Billfighter rebate from Buyers Advantage) and one for $5 (Q1 gas rebate from Travelers Advantage). Less the two stamps to send in the rebates, that makes another $19.18 in free money.
Add the Upromise and Trilegiant funds to my prior total and adjust my prior total for the three stamps I forgot to account for and my YTD Frugal Funds total is up to $324.15. If you want to see all the things that have gone into this total, just click the Frugal Funds category link to the left.
More free money from Trilegiant!
February 3rd, 2008A posted several months back about raping Trilegiant for free money and gift cards. Trilegiant is a marketing company that runs several paid membership programs under names like Autovantage, Buyers Advantage, and Great Fun. These programs are promoted with offers for free gift cards and other freebies for signing up for a trial membership. The general idea for the cheap bastard like me is to sign up for a trial, request the freebie (often as much as $50 in free gift cards), and cancel the membership. If you sign up for each of the different offers with freebies, you can net about $200 in freebies for less than an hour of work. Sweet…
But if you are willing to be patient, you can play them again before canceling. For most (but not all) of their services, they will offer you some type of incentive to stay with the program. Additionally, you can request an extension of your free trial so you don’t get charged while you are waiting for your other freebies.
I had some of these offers sent to my mom’s house in Louisiana, so I had a nice haul waiting in my mail when we visited yesterday. Here’s a summary:
- $20 check from Buyers Advantage ($20 credit card billfighter rebate)
- $10 check from AutoVantage ($10 gas rebate)
- $10 check from Travelers Advantage ($10 gas rebate)
- $40 Visa gift card from Complete Home
Add that $80 plus $0.13 in change I have found on the ground in the last week to my YTD Frugal Funds total, bring it to $233.13.
Got a side business? Track it with Microsoft Office Accounting Express for free
January 28th, 2008Do you run a website for profit? Sell on eBay for profit? Do freelance work on the side? In any business it is important to track your income and expenses so you can know exactly what you are really making.
Our friends over at Money Smart Life recently blogged about Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2008, which is available as a free download. While I have not used the program myself, MSL noted that the program is much more robust than most of the other free accounting software out there. If you are interested, you can download the software here.
Free H&R Block DeductionPro 2007 Software Download!
January 15th, 2008Here’s a useful tool for those of you who itemize your taxes and donated household goods to charity last year. The fine folks over at SlickDeals found a link to a download of H&R Block’s DeductionPro 2007 software that is free of charge. Just click on the link below and you’ll have the software in no time.
DeductionPro 2007 Software Download
I have used DeductionPro for the last several years since I got it free after rebate in a TaxCut software bundle. The software is still sold as a stand-alone product, however it is also included in the premium versions of TaxCut for 2007. It is a great tool for tracking donations and provides suggested values for many common items. It will also generate the necessary forms for your return and export the data to TaxCut for your return preparation. My only complaint about the software would be that I would like to see more items listed, but I’m basing my opinion on the 2006 version, so that may have improved with this version.
I would caution anyone would itemizes household good donations to use one of these types of programs instead of just trying to guess the value of the item. If we try to guess we often fall on the low side (I guess most of us think about what would the item fetch at a garage sale and not its true market value), so these types of programs help to make sure we get the full deduction we deserve.
Good luck!
Freebies for new parents
November 7th, 2007With the birth of the twins and all, this has been a wild week. So many things to do. So many things to learn. And nowadays, so many products to be pitched for baby. Baby products are a big business, and before your baby makes his first poopie you’ll probably start getting advertising for baby stuff. The hospital is no exception to the sales effort, as you are given so many sample packs, magazines, and other items all encouraging you to try a certain product. The upside is that there are some money saving freebies available for the asking. Here are a few good ones from all the stuff we have received.
Enfamil Family Beginnings – I list this one first because we have already received the first big sample pack. We registered with them several months ago and got in the mail this past week a sample pack with a can of powder formula plus a few formula checks (serve the same purpose as coupons.
UPromise $3 Bonus from Enfamil – Using this link, join UPromise with the promo code “DIAPER3″. This is valid only for new users. It is a pretty neat program where you register your frequent shopper cards and credit cards and are given a rebate of sorts when you purchase selected products or dine at participating restaurants. The rebates can then be transferred to your 529 college savings account, or you can request a check for cash. The rebates tend to accumulate slowly (I’ve only accumulated about $50 over 5 years), but it is free money.
20 Free Prints Online from CVS Photo Center – Simply go to CVS Photo Center online and use the promotional code “NEWMOM20″. The flyer also says that you get 10 free prints for registering as a new user, so you could probably end up with a total of 30 free prints.
Doing a Google search this evening, I also found a pretty good listing of freebies for new parents here. It will take a while to get through that list.
