Looking for creative ways to stretch your budget and earn a little extra? The National Consumer Panel (formerly known as Nielsen Home Scan) is accepting new applicants in many locations right now!
I loved this testimonial that reader Shannon sent in about her experience as a 3-year panelist:
“I have been an NCP panelist for 3 years. You are asked to scan anything you purchase, using their handheld scanner. For some smaller stores you need to enter the purchase price for each item and for other larger stores you do not need to enter prices. Once all items are entered you enter the total bill amount and payment that was used. It can be time consuming, depending on how much you buy. It typically takes me no more than 30 minutes a week to scan in all my purchases.
I am at a platinum level (3 years), which means I earn 245 points every week I scan. If you scan every week during a month, you earn 350 a month. On your anniversary date you earn 1,000 points. I also signed up to participate using my Amazon purchases, so once a month I download those and earn 1,000. I do not always do surveys but there are probably 8-10 surveys a month I could answer, with each one usually earning 150 points. Based on the above points, if I were to scan every week and do every survey offered (assuming 8 a month), in a year I would earn 12,740 points for weekly scans, 4,200 points for scanning each week, 12,000 points for submitting Amazon purchases, 1,000 on my anniversary date and doing 96 surveys would net me 14,400 points. This would be a grand total of 44,340 points for the year.
When you first sign up for NCP, you earn 150 points a week. I always purchase the Amazon gift cards with my points. A $25 gift card is 21,000 points and a $50 gift card is 41,000 points.
They also have contests throughout the year where you can earn extra points. NCP has great sweepstakes (although I have never won anything) and gives away weekly, monthly and quarterly cash prizes.”
I don’t recommend NCP. Within 24 hours of installing the needed software on my computer, the anti-spyware part of my anti-virus was disabled. I couldn’t get it back until I uninstalled NCP’s software. A week after I uninstalled, my computer was acting funny. Things would take forever to load and when they did, scripts weren’t running or some other popup error message came up. I did a full scan and realized NCP’s software somehow crept back in. It caused my computer to crash several times when I tried again to uninstall. Eventually, I had to get a new computer because it just never functioned the same way again. If you google the company, some people rave about them and some have the same issues I did. I’d say this one is a hit or miss.
Am I doing the calculation right?
30 minutes per week = 26 hours per year
For 44,000 points per year
$50=41,000 points
$50/26 hours = $1.92/hour
It’s always good to to the math to see if this is worth your time!
This is the problem I always had with swagbucks!
You are right, that is true about anything! You could say the same for any type of couponing (Swagbucks, Ibotta, Checkout 51, Wal-Mart Savings Catcher, Receipt Hog, Yaarlo, SavingStar, coupons.com, etc.). For some people this is a hobby and they use this as there down time, instead of (for instance) watching TV or scrolling Facebook. While I would not have participated in any of these programs when I had small children at home, I find them to be fun now. I enjoy being able to bless others with the proceeds earned from these programs!
$1.92/hr – but only IF you are at the platinum level and are efficient at scanning, able to record all your purchases in just 30 minutes weekly.
I tried this years ago and really wanted to make it work. It was so laborious, I gave up before my first anniversary having never cashed our for my investment of time.
I would run from this opportunity and find something more productive. Simply clipping the Friday Freebie digital coupon from Kroger yields a much greater financial return and takes literally less than 30 second each week.
Actually, she also included the surveys in the 44,000 points. Assuming each survey is 15 minutes, 8 surveys a month adds 2 hours per month, or 24 hours per year. That takes the hourly wage down to more like $1 per hour.