I have always been a fan of cashbacks, especially the instant ones. Deferred cashbacks can be a hit or a miss - have seen instances of they not coming through at all. Wallet Cos. like Paytm, Amazon Pay, Freecharge all give us cashbacks ranging from tiny amounts like ₹5 to large amounts like ₹250. For long, I counted cashbacks as free money and didn't worry about tracking them. Just ensured that they don't expire and used them up. Recently, I was excited to notice that my total cashback earnings were hitting three digits as in ₹300 in some months.
This is when I decided to take a closer look and computed the totals for a wallet platform. Turned out that the total was a princely four digit sum over the past year. I repeated the exercise across wallets that I use and arrived at a decent number. Add credit card earnings and that number becomes even bigger.
As a small time investor, I started feeling why not invest the money and see it grow? This is exactly what I am going to do now. Start investing the amount in a mutual fund. While the general advice has been to add the money to the funds I am already investing in, I will take a different route since this doesn't allow me to see it grow separately. I will use a new fund solely for this purpose - channelise cashback earnings and see it grow over the years.
Now the investments won't be big sums every month since monthly earnings can even be lesser than ₹100. So depending on how much comes, I am planning for a minimum of ₹500 to accumulate and then push it to this fund.
Want to do the same?
If you plan to do a similar thing with your cashbacks, just do it! Head over to your wallet's statement page and drill down for cashbacks. Amazon Pay for instance allows you to filter just the cashbacks -
Paytm's statements or spend analysis section show the details -
At Freecharge, use the 'Money In' filter.
A simple search of your email inbox can give you these details as well. Let me know what you do with cashbacks in comments.
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