I don’t necessarily go along with the whole new year resolution idea. I do think it’s good to have some set goals in mind to accomplish during the year. It helps to keep you focused and on track.

I like the idea of goals and not resolutions. Resolutions sound kind of negative to me like I resolve to stop doing “insert bad behavior here”.

I like to have some fairly easy goals like to keep saving X amount of money in our emergency fund(this one is easy as I have an auto transfer set up). I also have a few harder ones that help keep me on track, and are a bit more challenging to achieve.

For 2012 I added a new and easy goal to my list. I have made it a goal to fill out every survey on every receipt that offers any kind of reward. You may have noticed that on most of the store/restaurant receipts that you get now there is usually an offer to complete an online survey for the chance to win something. Usually it’s for money or a gift card.

My goal is to fill out all the online receipt surveys that I get. I usually gather them up and go through them once a week. It takes less than 10 minutes. I haven’t won anything yet but I also like leaving good reviews for places where I had a good experience. I know that these surveys get monitored and can help a store/employee/manager.

To me it’s a like a free way to play the lottery. I also don’t leave any personal information besides my email and If a survey is way too in depth then I usually just don’t do that one. Most are simple surveys asking if the store was clean and the employees nice. We don’t do a ton of shopping/eating out so the receipts we accumulate in a week aren’t that many and it’s manageable for me to do the surveys.

If I don’t win anything this year then I might just not bother doing  it next year.  I thought it would be fun to try it for a year and see what happens.