Mystery Shopping - Make A Few Extra Bucks

Did you know mystery shopping was an actual, legitimate thing? Well, as long as you go through actual legitimate companies. I have several I use, depending on the type of shops. You are a little more limited if you have small children because most don't allow you to bring them. But if you can sneak away for an hour or so, you can usually get something done. Get a free pizza, get paid to get groceries, make phone calls to certain companies, even get paid to get an oil change. The car services are my favorite. Not only do you get reimbursed for the service, you get paid for your time. Its just a matter of meeting all their criteria. 

I'm not going to go into too much detail here but I will give you a few avenues to locate the legit companies. 

As far as automotive goes, Bestmark is the best. They seem to mostly have shops for GM vehicles but they allow you to borrow a vehicle if you want. So you can offer a friend a free oil change and get paid to do it. They also have shops where you go to a dealer pretending you want to purchase a vehicle. I just did a shop for them today where I got paid to take scrap metal to the local scrap yard. Not only did I get the money from the yard for my metal, I got $20 for doing it. 

There's another series of shops called Sassie Shops. They consist of several different mystery shopping companies and you would have to apply individually to each one. There's probably 8-10 seperate businesses under the Sassie Shops name. The only 2 I've used are Confero and Intelli-Shop. They are all legitimate though. The Sassie Shops tend to be more retail but the range is huge. I saw a shop one time where they paid you $100 to go to a certain bank and apply for a credit card. Most stuff is around the $10 range with reimbursement for whatever products they require you to buy. 

The easiest way to see what's out there is through a site called Presto Insta Shops. It makes it easy to find shops in one place for all the Sassie Shop companies. They also have a mobile app.

As with all these companies, you don't get paid right away. Sometimes it can take up to 2 months but once you get in the groove, the paycheck stream can be steady. 

I have always been able to find ways to make money without going out a getting an actual, full time job. My husband works hard but we have a lot of debt to pay off so I need to be able to contribute financially. We refuse to let a day care or public school system raise our kids so things like this make that a lot easier.