Money Crashers: Save an Extra $1,000 in Just One Month

One of the presents I gave myself for my birthday was to cash in a bunch of the survey rewards that had been piling up in my accounts with MyPoints, Toluna, and Life Fun & Everything. I've been taking these surveys in my spare time for years, earning maybe 25 or 50 cents for each one I complete, which isn't much — but I've done a lot of them in that time, and I haven't made a point of cashing in the points regularly, so it had gotten to the point where I had over $1,000 in unused rewards just sitting there. So I traded in some of them for Starbucks and Barnes and Noble gift cards, as well as two Visa gift cards that I can use to pay for the new Critical Role book when it comes out this spring, plus another game from the store where we're buying it. Happy birthday to me!

The point of this is that even the little things you to to make more money, or to save more money, really can make a difference in the long term. And if you do enough of them at once, they can make a difference even in the short term.

That's the moral of my new article on Money Crashers, "8 Ideas to Make & Save an Extra $1,000 Fast (in Just One Month)." It's a lesson a lot of Americans could use, because according to a 2018 Bankrate survey, less than 40% of Americans actually have enough in savings to cover even a $1,000 unexpected expense. If the unexpected happens (as it tends to do), they have no choice but to borrow — and then they have to pay interest on that debt every month, making their budget even tighter and making saving even harder.

My article offers some suggestions on how to break this Catch-22. I suggest a variety of strategies —such as cutting unnecessary expenses, negotiating monthly bills, shopping rewards, side gigs, and loan refinancing — that people can combine to get themselves to that $1,000 goal in one month or less. It's not a huge financial cushion, but for many Americans, it could mean the difference between getting by and falling behind.