Free Book/Swagbucks

Last night my oldest daughter was doing her 15 minutes of reading, for part of her homework, when I heard a loud, "MOM"  come from  her room.  I went to see her and she was quite concerned and wanted me to read the end of her book because, "they forgot to put the end in the book."  I will admit that I didn't really believe her but I sat down and read aloud the last page or so from the book.  Sure enough, the story was not done.  This was a Nancy Drew mystery and to get to the end of the book and not have the mystery solved was not a nice surprise.  Looking at the front of the book it was instantly obvious that this was the first book in a trilogy.  Uh Oh!  In my Nancy Drew days there were no trilogies.  This book had been obtained for free using the gift certificate my daughter earned for participating in our library's summer reading program.  Now we needed to find two more books in order to finish the mystery.  A quick search of the online catalog at the library showed that they did not have the books.  I did a good bit of comparison shopping, including checking couponmountain.com  for discount codes, but was not having much luck finding the book at a lower price than the $5.99 it sells for at the book store once shipping was added.  In the end the best deal was to use the $5 gift card I had in my Amazon account from Swagbucks. Below is a more detailed explanation of Swagbucks. I wasn't sure if this card would apply to shipping but it did.  I was able to find a used copy of the book for 43 cents plus shipping for a total of $4.42.  The gift card was $5 making the book FREE!

Today's Savings:  $4.42

Total Savings:  $217.93

Swagbucks 

I just joined last month and have already earned one $5 Amazon gift card and am close to earning my second.  It is easy to earn the swagbucks and it amazes me how they really do add up.  Swagbucks are basically points you get added to your account when  you do the normal websearches you do every day or choose to do some of the other activities available to earn points.  I don't personally do much but the searches.  The program is completely free.  Once you reach a certain number of points you can trade them in for various items, such as Amazon gift cards.  Now that I have seen the result of having that "free" money help my family I am a believer and will be a member for a long time to come.  You can check it out here.