Always take the free money.

This definitely applies to your company’s 401k match, despite what Dennis at work thinks about it.

If credit card companies want to give me rewards for signing up and using their credit card, I’ll take it.

If a shopping portal wants to give me some percent cash back or a bonus offer for shopping, I’ll take that too.

Rakuten has always been my default shopping portal on my browser, but I finally gave in and signed up for Capital One Shopping. In less than 6 months, it has probably already rewarded me more than years of Rakuten. The $80 initial bonus definitely helped. But there have been several times where it gives a few dollars off at Amazon? I’m not sure about that part, but several of the offers have been pretty significant.

Of course, it tracks what web sites you have visited and then the next day or so you will receive a large percentage back offer from PetSmart or $60 back on a $120 purchase at Beyond Yoga. Two merchants I have utilized.

Another easy but significant redemption was when purchasing our summer passes to Lucky Strike bowling. It cost $117 for two unlimited summer passes (2 games a day and a $5 arcade credit), but they gave me $50 rewards back.

Referral Link: $80 for you if you follow their directions and $80 for me

I do like that you can now transfer Rakuten money over to Bilt which can then be transferred over to Alaskan Airlines which can then be used to book flights on American Airlines. However, with Capital One Shopping, you can redeem for a variety of gift cards such as CVS, Lowe’s, Panera, Fanatics, Gap, etc. Both times I’ve cashed in so far, I went for Lululemon gift cards to pair with our AmEx platinum Lulu credit.

The emails can be a bit much would be my only complaint, but you can unsubscribe from that. I can tolerate the annoyance of deleting emails in exchange for seeing the ones I can utilize.

Be advised that if an offer is for $20 off $100, it must equal $100 before taxes and such. I screwed that up once. Luckily, the stuff didn’t work out and we had to return most of it anyway.

I had avoided Capital One Shopping for quite awhile, but it turned out to be worth the $0. I figure Google and Amazon already have all of my shopping habits, why not let Capital One get in on the action.