What is UPromise?
by Kevin on March 30, 2008
I see it on the grocery carts and in store windows.
I see it advertised in magazines and mentioned on blogs.
But what is it? What is upromise.com
? I decided to dig in a little bit and see what this mysterious program/company can do for me.
Here’s how it works, straight from UPromise:
- Participating companies reward members who make eligible purchases of their products.
- Upromise receives revenue from these companies to help with operations and serve members.
- By joining, you’ll take advantage of a network of companies committed to helping members save for college.
- Our mission is to help make higher education affordable for all families.
upromise.com is a way for you to start saving for college education expenses now with you every day purchases. First you sign up for the service, and ‘connect’ a credit card to your account. When you spend money on that card at participating vendors, you get a certain percentage back. The website says the reward can be anywhere from 1-25%. That percentage reward is put into your UPromise account.
You can covert that money in your account in two different ways. It can be deposited into a 529 education savings account, or you can receive a check if the amount if over $250. Use Google to figure out how to do that after you sign up.
Is there any reason to not sign up with upromise.com? Not that I can see. (If anyone knows of any issues, please comment). Again, I had no idea it was a free service. I assumed you had to pay a fee or something along those lines. Apparently that is untrue. So use your credit card (wisely), earn some cash back, and earn some rewards for future education expenses. Seems like a good deal to me.
Also as you can see from the graphic above, if you sign up and make a purchase online with one of the many corporate partners by April 30th, you’ll earn an extra $10.
Has anyone out there used upromise.com already? How much have you earned in rewards? I’m signing up right now and connecting my AMEX card. We’ll revisit the post in the future and see how many rewards I’ve earned.
Tagged as:
College Savings,
UPromise
{ 3 comments }
I’ve been signed up for Upromise for about two years. So far we’ve earned about $35.
You can register all your debit and credit cards, as well as grocery cards. When you purchase items in stores, you have to be sure to select “credit” and not enter your PIN, or you won’t get the savings.
Most of the savings come from online shopping and participating restaurants. Or, you can sign up for their credit card and get 1% back on all your purchases (we don’t do that though, just the cards we already have).
You can also have your friends and relatives sign up and link to your account. We haven’t had much success with this though because our parents are paranoid about sending their credit card info over the Internet. 🙂
I have been using this for a while ~2 years saving for nephews and neice. Occaionsally something pops up on there from a restaurant that I go to, or a purchase at the grocery store. The biggest saving is if you get are if you are purchasing online REMEMBER to check and link through their site.
There have been a number of times the day after I order something I think about it and realize I could have gotten up to 4% of it put to the savings.
I think I have put in about $30 in this time for them, and for free they won’t complain.
I’ve been a member for about 6 years now. Our family has nearly $2,000 in our account. The Upromise credit card is very helpful as is shopping online through their site. Plus, several family members are linked and that’s added up to over $900 right there. The trick is you have to check out the site to make sure you find out who they have added recently. We were just thinking of doing work on our house and I noticed they had ServiceMagic now listed. So I went through Upromise to find contractors and got $4 in my account. It works if you pay attention to it. This won’t pay for my kids tuition, but if it pays for books, fees, some tuition etc…how can you go wrong?
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