How To Make Money During Quarantine: Staffer tries different ways to earn money from home

Intro

As my last few pennies purchase a summer fit (who knows if I’ll get the chance to wear it) and unnecessary room decor pieces (thank you, tik tok), my piggy bank is pretty much empty. It was time to hustle — I researched how to earn some extra coin from the confines of my own home during the trying times that are quarantine.

Fetch Rewards

According to Tik Tok, if I signed up for Fetch Rewards, a rewards app that gives you points for scanning receipts which can be added up to buy gift cards, I would get paid and receive free clothes and makeup products. With all this time I have, I thought it couldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes trying out the app if it meant getting paid — and I wasn’t disappointed. 

Signing up wasn’t exactly what TikTok made it out to be — free Lululemon and Glossier products didn’t magically appear at my doorstep, but it did earn me a few free gift cards. All I had to do was scan every grocery receipt in your house — which Fetch sells to companies for market research to improve marketing — and send out referral codes to everyone on your contacts list.

The app rewards in points for taking pictures of receipts from stores like Price Chopper or CVS, and with those points, you can redeem gift cards from a wide range of rewards the app offers, from Visa rewards cards to Ray-Ban gift cards. You’ll get even more points by sending out your referral code — there’s a 4,000 point reward if they sign up and scan their first receipt. But to put it in perspective, if you want to cop a $5 gift card, you better gain 5,000 points.

In only a few days I’ve managed to stack up enough points from referral codes and my parents’ Hen House receipts to receive a $10 Chipotle gift card via email.

While it may take some time to get your points to add up before you can buy anything, doing so took me a minimal amount of effort and I did it all from my bed. It’s a great way to make use out of those Costco receipts your family has accumulated during quarantine before throwing them away.

Survey Junkie

Survey Junkie, a website for answering survey questions that go toward points that transfer to money in your Paypal account, proved that taking surveys to make money is something that you would have to spend months doing before you can cash in your reward. The amount of time and countless surveys it would take to cash in your money is discouraging, and not the most efficient way to earn some pocket money. 

Survey Junkie is one of the most popular survey-taking sites, so it’s ironic that they only offer one or two surveys per week, ranging from topics like how many times you’ve traveled this year or how many siblings you have. I was bombarded with six of them the first day I signed up — which didn’t even seem like much at the time — and I have yet to see another one. 

On top of that, I wasn’t allowed to redeem the heaping fortune of $1.65 that I made — you have to have earned a minimum of $5 before redeeming a single dime of it. While I didn’t expect much for just answering questions like whether I have a goldfish or a gecko, I was expecting at least a few more surveys since the point is to help out as many companies as possible.

While barely any effort is needed to answer a few questions about yourself and your opinions, it would probably take months before you can earn a useful amount of points to buy any gift cards. Let’s just say, you’re better off rummaging through an old piggy bank and collecting what’s left — which would probably add up to more than you’d make on this website.

Redbubble Stickers

Redbubble is an app or website that allows creators to make designs that can be printed out for the buyer on anything from stickers to phone cases. Typically, stickers are sold at two to four dollars and you will have a default “markup” of 20%, giving you 20% of each sale or adjustable to what you deem fair. However, this means that the buyer will have to pay more, which may decrease sales.

While this method of making money is one that benefits from some preexisting experience in design, you don’t have to be an expert to sell stickers on Redbubble. All you need is to have Adobe Illustrator downloaded on your school computer and an idea for a sticker that you would buy yourself.

Depending on how much effort you put into making stickers, Redbubble can potentially make you a lot more than the other methods of earning money online — that is, if your sticker gets popular. After spending less than 30 minutes creating my COVID-inspired sticker — a globe wearing a facemask that said “stop the spread” — I didn’t have high expectations for anyone buying it. 

After creating and uploading my sticker to my profile, I waited hopefully for days — and made no sales.  

Now, I don’t claim to be a master of stickers or anything, but I did spend 30 minutes making the sticker — more than the average person might. So if no profit was made after that, then I took it as a sign that this may not be my calling.

However, trying out the app made me realize that those with an exceptional gift for design and a more creative brain than I could use this app to start their own business. Start small, creating around ten stickers, and make sure to put in related tags when publishing that correlate with the sticker — the more you do, the more people will see it.

If you get any sales, keep in mind that you will only get a varying percentage of the retail price, since the rest goes to Redbubble. Selling enough of these could still be worth it as a mini-job during quarantine, and it’s worth a try.