Upromise.com: An Online College Savings Program

If you're a parent and you have not signed up with upromise.com, you really need to read this and sign up, right away! It's a wonderful program for college savings, and I highly recommend it to any parent, especially those of young children like myself.

The program runs a lot like the Mypoints program (see my article about that). You earn money through shopping with merchants online and in person, and that money goes into an account which you can convert to a 529 College Savings Plan or use to pay student loans. I save the money for my son, but with myself listed as an active student, I could technically use it to pay a payment or two.

When you sign up you'll see a list of merchants in your local area that participate. Then you can pay in cash with those merchants, and your purchases are tracked through their discount card. You sign up and confirm your discount card with the company on the website. My local grocery store has signs for each item that you can purchase with the program which will then convert to savings. It's usually a very small percentage of the item price (see the site for available items and percentage contributions) but those things add up over the course of time.

You can also link your debit and credit cards to the account (securely) so that merchants like Exxon can credit you for gas purchases in person, and so that you can receive credit for your purchases with the online merchants.

You can sign up multiple children and determine an amount (percentage wise) of your earned Upromise income goes to each child. Another awesome feature is that you can invite friends and relatives to the site and have their earnings go to your children, too. This is perfect for grandparents, aunts and uncles.

It will take a long time to add up depending on how much shopping you do and if you have any helpers, but any free college money is better than no college money, right?

Some of the merchants are: Walmart.com, (sadly, they have no in store method of tracking purchases with cash, and I wish they did) Ebay.com, and JCPenny.com. See the site for more.

Some of the brands are: Nestle, Beechnut, and Florida's Natural Orange Juice. See the site for more.