As I was relaxing the other day, I decided that I needed to try to go back and really figure out how much money I've made by using phones for payments. I've been doing this year for several years now, and it's finally time to try to put a number to how much just one person can make by tapping to pay.
First, for the uninitiated, how do you make money by paying with phones? In an attempt to bring more users to their platform, various apps will offer rewards for completing challenges, rewards based upon accrued points, or both. Samsung Pay is one such platform with their Samsung Rewards offering points for each transaction, but then also offering larger amounts of points for completing the challenges that pop up from time to time. An example of such a challenge was their recent Chase Card promo, in which, if you completed five transactions by a certain date using Samsung Pay and your Chase card added there, you were to be award 2,000 Reward Points.
When speaking of Reward Points, I look at them as cash on a 1000 points equals $5.00 basis. How is that? If you save your rewards points until you hit at least 10,000 points each time this maximizes their value in the Rewards store. 10,000 points will get you a $50.00 gift card, where is smaller amounts get you less in cash proportionately, and larger amounts are redeemed at the same rate. Therefore, the 2,000 points is the equivalent of $10.00 in my book, and was easy to crank out five transactions in one day whilst running errands. Not a bad way to earn cash while doing the shopping you had to do regardless.
Now, recalling each and every reward I've earned has been difficult, but I've been aided by my usage of my Google Inbox and the fact that I haven't deleted an email for 6+ years. Unfortunately, I'm sure I've missed some scores along the way, but I'm going to continue to try and update this spreadsheet as much as possible.
Updated: December 21, 2017. Total earned in list: $400.00