Turk it up!

Well good evening everybody.  Oh. My. God!  It is pumpkin beer season already!  Hot damn I’m excited and you should be too.  In all the excitement and commotion, you probably thought I forgot about you.  Do not be sad.  The blog is back!  Mr. Budgetsandbeer has just been busy as hell.  Crazy summer schedule, work has been nuts, and I will soon be moving into a new job.  But the craziest thing of all is that Baby Dude has just turned 1.  Holy crap.  He can’t be Baby Dude anymore, he has officially been promoted to Toddler Dude.  Pray for me.

All my crazy shenanigans has left me unable write very often.  I tell Mrs. BudgetsandBeer all the time that “excuses don’t make friends”.  Well I am here to win your friendship back because I just laid out a shit ton of excuses.  To make things even I am going to give you one of my little secrets to making money on the side.  Please get your minds out of the gutter and into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

You totally cannot hold a grudge against me for not writing because while my fingers were not flying across my keyboard writing this fantastic blog; I was clicking my way into making a little extra money.  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website allows you to perform HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) or take small surveys for real money.  These are things that a software program or robot can either not do yet or it is too expensive to have them perform.  That is where you, your mouse, and some small brain power comes into play.  Most tasks and surveys are very simple and only take a couple seconds to a few minutes to complete.  You can preview most task so if you do not like them you can simply return them.  I have made anywhere from $0.01 per task to $3.00 for a quick 5 minute survey.  The best part of this entire thing is that you can sit at your desk, in your PJs, and drink a beer while you make money.  Yes, I’ll type that again.  Drink beer while you make money!  Please make money responsibly and steer clear of drunk online shopping.

Full disclosure here.  You are not going to become a millionaire completing HITs.  It might even take you a little while to make $100.  But if you stumble across a lucky task like I did one afternoon while Toddler Dude (man that is hard to say) was napping; you’ll find yourself  making $0.17 a task to translate paragraphs from history textbooks into simple sentences for a few hours.  All the sudden you made $20.  That’s a solid mix 6-pack of great beer from the local bottle shop.  Sorry, as you may have already figured out I round everything I do financially into cases of beer.  Keeps my life simple.  Here is a screenshot of my current account:

          

          Not much right?  Well as much as it pains me to say this; I did not buy beer with my earnings.  Blasphemy, I know.  I took the much wiser and far less exciting option of rolling some of the cash into my brokerage account with Fidelity.  I bought my old person self one share of a nice 5.68% dividend producing iShares US Preferred Stock ETF.  Fee-free from Fidelity thank you very much:

And would you look at that.  Already made 4 cents today.  Hell yea!  I am such an old man.

Yea, ok that is not that much money at all.  I gave you a fair warning you’re not going to get rich by doing this but maybe, just maybe you will get your lazy ass off the couch and turn off Keeping up with the Kar….. I can’t even write the rest of that title because it hurts too much.  Maybe you will make your retirement nest egg just a little bit bigger.  All while sipping on a nice fall beer.  This is a no brainer.

          My beer of the blog today is Long Trail’s Harvest Ale.  Harvest Ale is a seasonal Autumn brown ale that has a malty-maple sweet flavor that lingers on your tongue.  It is sessionable at 4.4% ABV so while your toes are all nice and warm around a fire; two or three Long Trail Harvest Ales will keep the rest of you warm all night long.  I strongly recommend pairing this fine beer with an entire pumpkin pie.  Cheers!