My IKEA Card Arrived!!!

My IKEA card is here! That was SO fast! 5 weeks and 1 day from the day I started the deal, and only 2 weeks since they received my paperwork and I was approved! And yes - I called to verify the balance :)

Want to do your own gift card deal? Read my journey from end to beginning here.

My $500 IKEA Gift Card Was Approved!

I'm 6-8 weeks from a $500 IKEA gift card! I checked my status this afternoon and found this message:

You have been approved by the sponsor(s). Your redemption certificate was processed on Jun 9 2009 12:04PM. Your free gift will be mailed out within 6 to 8 weeks of the processing date.

-- Thank you.

Woo-hoo! That was fast :) To read my 1st update, click here. Also, if you want to do your own gift card deal, I suggest surfing over to MoneySavingMethods.com to read more about it.

$500 IKEA Gift Card Challenge, Update 2

Here's another update on my $500 gift card challenge.

Since May 24th, I've been waiting...and waiting.....and waiting for my Platinum offers to approve (to read my 1st update, click here). I was starting to get pretty discouraged! Carrie over at MoneySavingMethods.com said generally, the offers approve in 10 day cycles, so by the 11th day, the offers that are going to be approved should have been approved. Well, yesterday was the 11th day, and nothing else approved. 2 of the offers that had not yet approved were ones I had to cancel early, and I wondered if that affected the status. So I surfed through some of the other offers to see if I could do a couple more, but none of them looked appealing and all of them required mailing something back after the trial period (and I would have had to pay for the initial shipping & handling). Whatever is sent back should be sent with delivery confirmation (thus needing to be sent priority mail), and since the postal rates went up again recently, I decided to wait a few more days, lest I spend extra money that I didn't need to spend.

I woke up this morning, checked my status, and all 4 of my outstanding offers approved!! Woo-hoo!

I printed out the necessary forms and mailed them off this morning. So far, I have spent $58.60. I will have to mail one other thing back, and possibly more if I didn't read the fine print correctly. Now, I wait and see how long it takes to get the gift card :)

$500 IKEA Gift Card Challenge, Update 1

I said in my last entry that I'd be updating you as I work on earning a $500 IKEA gift card. I'll be documenting my time spent on the deal, as well as money spent on the deal.

I began the deal at 9:15 PM on May 19th. It took me about 40 minutes to pick 8 offers (2 "Silver" offers , 2 "Gold" offers , and 4 "Platinum" offers) that I wanted to try (for a fuller explanation, see this entry). I was careful to read the fine print (how long is this "free" trial? what is the true cost? do I have to send the product back if I cancel my membership?), so that I could try and spend the least amount of money, and not have to send a lot of stuff back. I e-mailed myself the terms to each of the offers, clumping them together by offer type (Silver, Gold, and Platinum), so it was only 3 e-mails and not 8. Then I e-mailed myself the terms of the overall gift card deal, as well as the link to check to see if my offers were approved.

Then I spent about 15 minutes, reading through the deals again and getting myself organized. I set up a daily reminder in my Gmail calendar, reminding me every morning to check the status of the various offers. Thankfully, I-deal, the company who organizes these deals, makes it easy to check; simply go to the web page, enter your e-mail address, and they show you a list, saying whether the offer is approved or pending. I also included in my calendar reminder the date I need to cancel each of the offers, in chronological order. Some of them are "free" for 7-10 days; others are "free" up to a month. I wanted to be really organized so I wasn't having to search through all of my e-mails every day to remind myself which ones to cancel.

By the next morning (May 20th), both silver offers were approved. On May 23rd, both gold offers were approved. As of now, none of the platinum offers have approved.

Today, May 24th, I called to cancel 2 offers that only had a 7 day trial. One of these offers has not yet been approved; this will be a test to see whether or not it still goes through, or if I have to do another offer. This particular one was $1 for 7 days, but then it costs $24.95. It's not worth the additional cost.

So far, I have spent $36.17. I will have at least 1 more charge, plus return postage, as 2 of the products need to be mailed back. This isn't too bad, as last time I spent over $70, just for the initial costs.

For more information on how I started doing these deals and what I've learned so far, go to this entry about my $500 Sears gift card.

CVS & Another $500 Gift Card

Hello, friends! I've been busy. I have 1 CVS transaction that I still need to post toward my CVS challenge. I went again earlier this week, but they didn't have anything I wanted. Bummer!

The big news is that I started another deal for a $500 gift card last night. This one is for a gift card to IKEA! Sometimes the company opts to send you a check or a general Visa card, but since I used the same company that sent me the $500 Sears card, I imagine I will get the IKEA card.

I'll be documenting this journey as well for those of you who are considering doing one of these deals. Stay tuned!