In the past two days I have covered good places to put your savings for higher education. Now, in the typical saving freak way, I am going to unveil FREE MONEY FOR COLLEGE!!

There are two programs out there that will give you free money just for shopping at vendors that you buy stuff from anyway. The first is Baby Mint and the second is UPromise. Here’s how it works, both of these programs have partnered with various merchants, most of them big name retailers, to give you cash back into your college savings plans. All you do is shop at the stores you normally would and receive free money for your college savings. There are some slight differences so here we go:

Baby Mint– You go online to their website and register for the program. Right now you can only purchase items online and receive credit. This is because the provider for the Baby Mint College Savings Credit Card backed out of their deal rather unexpectedly. So Baby Mint is searching for another company to work with. As soon as the program is back up you will be able to use their credit card at any merchant in their network and receive free money back into you account. The biggest advantage to Baby Mint is you can put the money into a 529 or use it to PAY OFF YOUR STUDENT LOAN!! That’s right Baby Mint is good for everyone even if you do not have kids. How awesome is that!!

UPromise–Same type of initial registration as Baby Mint except that you register your current credit or debit card with UPromise and they track your shopping using that card. The rebates tend to be a little lower that Baby Mint and they will only let you deposit your money in specific 529 plans. So you will want to measure the plans available with the 529 guide. The key to this is, once Baby Mint gets their credit card back up and running, register that card with UPromise and get double rewards.

Both of these programs will allow friends and family to also contribute to your college savings by registering their cards (UPromise) or setting up an account of their own and transferring the earnings (Baby Mint). Either way this is a great way to get the grandparents help out with college savings.

I hope that this series was informative and that if you enjoyed it you will consider subscribing to my blog via e-mail or in a reader


This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 12:15 am and is filed under Saving For College, money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.