Play This App and Lose Some Student Debt
Americans are loaded down with a burden of student debt unparalleled in the history of the nation. Today the average loan repayment for a college grad is a few hundred dollars a month — which in today’s economy is a pretty big bite of anyone’s salary. According to lender LoanStar, “More and more former college students are declaring bankruptcy or filing for welfare forgiveness, trying to tame this ravening financial beast.” But one Purdue University graduate happened on a different way to lower her overall student debt; she downloaded an obscure trivia app, played to win, and was able to wipe out ten thousand dollars of her student debt in one brilliant move. Amanda Jeffries says she never plays trivia games, but when she heard about Givling’s trivia app she decided to give it a shot. Now she’s very glad she did.
Jeffries is an interdisciplinary agriculture graduate from the Indiana school, and was having a hard time paying off her student debt when she ran across a Facebook post by an old school friend that touted the trivia app by Givling that gives players a chance to lower their indebtedness. Once she tried it, Jeffries says she found it both easy and entertaining, and so just kept on playing to see what would happen.
A press release from Givling states that their app is meant to be a gamifying crowdsource gambit. Givling players raise funds in order to pay off their student loans, or even home mortgages. Winners submit their student loan account pin number and then Givling will contact the lender to arrange payment — usually in full.
Funding trickles in from the players who buy coins in order to earn additional trivia games, as well as through some generous big ad partners like Airbnb and Uber. The winners are encouraged to donate a part of their winnings back to the fund to keep it viable, and perhaps even grow it big enough so that more winners can be included.
There are several ways to win a cash prize.
The largest cash prize in the app game so far has been fifty thousand dollars. Players move up a line by sharing their personal PIN promo code, or they can interact with selected ads. At some point the #1 place can expect to collect the fifty thousand and then the game recycles for a number two spot, and so on down to numbers seven or eight.
Winners are also chosen at random from trivia answering teams that work together to answer such questions as “How many legs does a centipede have?” (No, not one hundred, despite what their name implies — the common centipede has only thirty legs.)
The way Jeffries hit the jackpot was to simply be in the right spot at the right time. Every time the game achieves a thirty-five thousand dollar balance it automatically chooses someone who is currently playing and awards them at random ten thousand dollars.
Jeffries says when she was notified of her windfall she at first thought it must be a scam. Only when her loan account showed the ten thousand dollar payment was she ready to believe that she had actually won.
Does she recommend the trivia app to others?
“You bet!” she says enthusiastically.