Review of Cashduck

Anybody else been hearing about Cashduck on forums and frugal-minded blogs?




I've been curious about Cashduck, the most recent project of one of the best movers-and-shakers in the personal finance blogosphere, Kira of Penny Foolish. Kira started posting a while back about all the cash she was raking in by doing paid-to-try offers. This is when you take advantage of sign-up bonuses, while fully expecting to back out of the contract during the trial period so you're not locked into an ongoing charge. Lots of companies offer these sign-up bonuses--dating sites, survey sites, auto clubs, ebay sales kits, you name it.

Kira hooked in with a bunch of sites that gather these offers in one place and let you pick and choose which offers you want to take advantage of. It takes more work than, say, the 0% balance transfer game that some people play with credit cards, because you have to keep track of when the free trial period expires and cancel your membership before that. This involves the usual headaches of sitting on hold, having someone try to talk you into keeping the membership, checking later to make sure your credit card was not in fact charged, etc. And some of these offers require you to give out your credit card number in order to sign up. Some even charge your card--the trick is that the sign-up bonus has to be greater than whatever you paid in shipping. For example, if you sign up for a monthly supply of Hoodia diet pills you would never actually try taking, you'd pay $4.95 in shipping but get a $20 bonus for signing up. If you don't cancel within 14 days, you get another month's worth for $14.95 a month. But if you cancel, and subtract the shipping costs from the sign-up bonus, you just made $15.05.

I was pretty skeptical when I first started reading about these things. Give my credit card number out? No way. My real name and address? Uh-uh. But then Kira started her own site, Cashduck, back in September. The Cashduck devotees have been increasing in numbers and volume ever since, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I joined up this week and have participated in 4 offers. I have paid around $6 and made around $46. I have successfully cancelled one of the accounts. I have two more that I have to kill next week before I go away for Turkey Day. It has been fun so far. The site is pretty easy to use, even though it lacks a little bit in polish. But I don't miss the polish of, say, FatWallet, because there's Kira's straightforward, quirky personality all over the site. Have a problem? Submit a trouble ticket, and within a couple hours she write you back to say, "Crap, I must not have been paying attention..." and she fixes the problem right away. Find a typo? She'll give you a feather, the secondary reward system at Cashduck. (The main thing you get out of participating is actual cash, but you do earn "feathers" as well which can be exchanged for Cashduck promo materials like fridge magnets, or for gift cards).

I still can't believe I'm actually using my real name and address, but Kira asks that you not submit fake information and I don't want to mess up her credibility with the vendors so I think I'd better respect that. I will probably be getting email spam and junk mail til my dying day from this experiment.

But I admit that I find it a little addictive. After watching the slow drip drip drip of pennies trickling into my accounts through blog advertising, and the slightly faster dropdropdrop of money that comes in from doing surveys, this seems like a veritable geyser. You mean that's it? A little time poking around Kira's cool site, filling out a couple forms, and you're going to PayPal me $46? There are over a thousand dollars worth of similar offers I haven't availed myself of yet, so you can make a quick buck, well, pretty darn quick.

But it is pretty mindless, and I know that just one misstep, like a cancellation that doesn't go through and results in a credit card charge that I have to fight, will turn me off of this game. For now, though, it's a fun new toy and I enjoy Kira's enthusiasm on Cashduck as much as I do on her blog.

(Full disclosure: All Cashduck links in this post are referral links. Feel free to strip out my referral ID if you want to sign up without it.)