This post brought to you by Upromise by Sallie Mae. All opinions are 100% mine.

Generally speaking, I do my online shopping at two distinct times each week. I love to shop on Fridays because so many of my favorite brands offer great deals to kick off the weekend. I also love to shop REALLY early in the morning, when the house is quiet and I can actually have an uninterrupted thought. I don’t have to get dressed or fix my hair. I can just sit in my office, in my jammies, and shop at the most convenient hour of the day for me: 4am. I don’t know about you, but my local mall isn’t open at that hour!

I seriously doubt that I need to convince you of how awesome online shopping is. But did you know that in many cases, you could be earning cash back for your child’s college when you make those purchases? Upromise by Sallie Mae is a FREE service to help you save for college expenses (your own or your child’s!). It has been around for several years and I’ve had an account for quite a long time.

But in truth, I ALWAYS forget to go to the UPromise website and see if the online retailer where I’m shopping offers cash back. And as I result, my grand total of college savings with the program is just shy of $9. I mean, I’ll take it, but that’s pretty lame. But it is all my fault, because I never utilize the program!

UPromise knows that many of its members struggle to remember to use it, so they created RewardsU, which is a toolbar you can very easily download and then use when you are searching for something you want to buy. I went to UPromise.com, got myself logged in (signing up is also easy if you don’t have an account!) and then clicked on the big orange button to get the toolbar installed.

For those of you who love to keep a ton of tabs open, just be aware that all of your tabs need to be closed before you can install the toolbar. Once I had it installed, I looked for the icon on my toolbar list. There it is in the right corner!

I clicked on the icon, and a simple search bar pulled up. I then searched for an item that Kayla from KaylaAimee.com taught me about: the beauty blender. Evidently it is the makeup applicator tool unlike any other, and I have been wanting to treat myself to it. If you are like me, you rarely treat yourself to things like this that are nice to have to totally unneccessary, so I have to say that the sell was made easier when I realized I could earn a portion of my purchase back in funds for college. Win/win!

I thought the search results were SO COOL! It showed me several different places where I could find the coveted beauty blender, and it also highlighted the places that were UPromise rewards partners so I could easily see where my purchase could result in college savings.

Once I decided where I wanted to shop, I just clicked on the UPromise button in the search results and my ability to save was activated. See the note at the top of the screen letting me know that I’m good to go? It stays up there for about 10 seconds before going away, just FYI. I then went on my way, made my purchase, and felt good about knowing that 5% of what I spent was coming straight back to my kiddos.

As a longtime UPromise member who never actually remembers to use the service, I’m absolutely thrilled with RewardsU. It is right there on my toolbar now, which makes it SO much easier to think of when I’m doing my shopping. I’m looking forward to watching my college savings for the girls increase with UPromise, because goodness knows I’m going to keep shopping online! 🙂