Guns, Glass and Garters: Or How to Make $12 on a Friday Night

How often does someone send you home with a garter and some crystal when you finish a date?  On second thought, don't answer that.

When Fritz asked me to marry him a few weeks ago, <swoon>, I'm not sure he was prepared to deal with my sudden transformation into a crazed penny pincher.
My mission is to cut unnecessary spending out of our budget, save money, and find fun/free things to do until we can afford a nice wedding and an amazing honeymoon.  

With that in mind, I started researching ways to make extra money and ran across an app called

 Field Agent while reading the Penny Hoarder blog.  Field Agent is an app that pays you to act as a secret shopper for their clients such as WalMart, Walgreens, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, etc.  After completing a number of screeners to discern your demographics and interests, the app matches you with clients and posts jobs that are available in your area or online.  Sometimes the jobs are as simple as driving to the nearest 7-11 gas station and making sure they have something displayed properly.  Jobs like this typically pay $3.00 to $6.00 and involve looking for a product, answering a question and taking a picture.  That's it. It sounded too good to be true, but after reading some reviews I decided to give it a go.

In an effort to find something fun to do without spending any money tonight, I checked out the Field Agent app and spotted the perfect job - a Wedding Registry Mystery Shop.  Wait, we can get paid $12.00 for doing something we might have to do anyway?  Fritz agreed and we headed for the mall.

Once there, we got to 'work' and followed the directions on the app.  Basically, we were supposed to walk around the Dillards home goods department and wait for someone to greet us, then pretend that we wanted to open a wedding registry.  This particular job said not to tell the employee that we were on an assignment so we acted naturally, if that's possible for us, and set one up.

The employee who worked with us, Sarah, was incredibly helpful and actually fun to talk to.  She signed us up for a registry, the manager gave us a gift bag, then Sarah presented the piece de resistance - a barcode scanner.  Why are those things so much fun?  Fritz and I ran around the store scanning random things we liked, answered 30 survey questions about the store and the experience, took a picture of our registry receipt and cashed out our $12.  

The gift bag was pretty nifty as well (see below).  It included a bunch of Dillards stationary, a voucher for free makeovers for myself and all of my bridesmaids, a $17.00 Mikasa Balloon glass, a garter and a bunch of advertisements all in a handy reusable shopping bag.  

This was our first real experience with Field Agent, aside from a $1 survey I completed on bedding preferences, and overall I thought it was pretty awesome.  We actually made money on a date night, came home with some goodies and had a ton of fun pretending to be secret agents.  One blog I read said that you could make $25 an hour using Field Agent.  That might be possible, but the jobs are first come, first serve, so there is competition to complete them, especially on weekends.  I think it would be great for someone who has extra time during the week that likes to run around town, or to make a few extra dollars here and there.  Why not? 

I didn't get paid to write this review and I don't get a bonus if you sign up, unfortunately, but if you're interested in signing up, you can read all of the details on the Field Agent site.