What Would You Do With an Extra $160+ A Year?

It is a simple question. What would you do with an extra $160 a year? While that is not exactly life changing money it is still a decent sum that could mean not having to worry about a light bill one month or paying car insurance one month or being used towards excursions like vacations. So, what would you do with an extra $160 a year?

Me, I put my extra $160 a year towards my reselling business and compound that $160 into larger sums of money. I do this by buying items at a pretty low price and then selling them on sites like eBay, Amazon, and Mercari for a higher price (partly because these sites all charge a fee for using them and I like money).

Truly knowing how much my $160 each year has grown is hard to pinpoint so I won’t bother putting a dollar amount on it. Part of the reason it is hard to figure up exact numbers is the fact that even though that $160 is used, I take the profits from the sales and buy more stuff and sell that as well. This process is repeated throughout the year - creating more money out of that $160.

Now, you may be wondering, how do you get that $160 each year? Surely it is hard or requires a ton of personal information. Nope.

It also does not involve filling out long surveys that end up telling you, after they waste 15+ minutes of your life, that you do not qualify for the offer that you worked for either.

The $160 each year is yours for doing stuff you already do. Simply using Bing by Microsoft, you can earn points (5 points per search) up to a daily limit. There are daily point limits for both your home computer and your cell phone. There are also additional points available for clicking focused searches that Microsoft has specifically picked for you. There are also quizzes and short, often eight questions long, surveys available that give you points for simply doing them. That’s right, no wasting 15+ minutes on a survey only to be told no points for you.

You will also get points each day for simply using Microsoft Edge as your browser (don’t worry, you can simply use it for doing Bing). Using Edge only for Bing also has the added benefit of keeping those searches, and cookies, out of your regular every day browser. Using Edge for Bing represents about $7 of that $160 annually so it is up to you if that is worth your time to use another browser or not.

One thing not taken into account for the value calculations is the “streaks” that you can earn that give you additional points. Every few days you earn a set amount of points for completing everything Bing offers each day.

Now, how do you get those points into money you can use? Simple. Bing offers a store for you to spend your points on. The $160 annually is based on your taking the $5 gift cards for various stores (I choose the Walmart card myself).

Other stores you can get a $5 gift card for include Amazon, Burger King, Target, Starbucks, Domino’s, Sephora, and more.
This gives each point you earn a value of $0.000952380952. Doesn’t sound like much per point, huh? Considering each search gets you five points, or $0.00476190476, it seems like it will take forever to reach $160. It only takes a year of about 5 minutes a day of your time. That is about $5.14 per hour to use Bing. Not a living wage or whatever you want to call it but, come on, this is literally money for doing something you already do (and even possibly learning something new).

If you choose something like the Xbox Game Pass at 7,000 points for a month of service this you can get the point value up to $0.00142714286 each or about $8.22 an hour of time spent using Bing. This option also raises the annual earnings to about $246.61 total.

A month of Xbox Live Gold is also 7,000 points so it would work out to be the same value as Xbox Game Pass.
For me, that Walmart gift card is too hard to pass up. I don’t have an Xbox capable of using Xbox Game Pass, or Xbox Live Gold, so that higher value reward is lost on me. To resell it I would have to put more effort into it for a minimal return on that time.

So, what would you do with an extra $160 a year?

Sign up for Bing here.