After writing this post, I was dismayed to find Ibotta removing money I’d earned from my account due to inactivity. So if I didn’t use it in a month, they took out $3.99 each time. I didn’t get any notification that this would happen! See my screenshot below, where the took out $12 over the last few months:

I was pretty upset after seeing that and just decided if that’s the case than the app is not worth dealing with and I deleted it!

My Original Post:

Last Saturday I wrote about checking your receipts for free stuff and coupons, and this is yet another thing you can do with those receipts- scan them for cash back.

The app I use most often for this is Ibotta. You can even dip your toe in the extreme couponing world by planning ahead and combining your rebates with coupons and sales to get free or nearly free items, but that takes a lot of time and is sometimes just more trouble than its worth (for me at least.) 

Once you sign up and download the app, you can filter offers by store and type. They change every week so you have to scan your receipt within the offer time limit. You can almost always find something on there, and there’s usually a few random “any brand” type products. For example, last week it was pretzels, protein powder and cake mix.

The one problem I have is remembering to scan barcodes. Sometimes you have to scan the barcode so if you wait to scan the receipt, you may have already thrown away your evidence!

There’s actually a lot more to the program and more ways to save, but I just wanted to do a quick easy overview. I’m not really using the app to its full potential, but have gotten nearly $100 back just by haphazardly remembering to do it. So it’s worth at least investing a few minutes each grocery trip, for a few dollars back every time. It eventually adds up!

*Unless you forget to use it regularly and then they take your money back 😦