How to pay money from a virtual Mastercard into your PayPal/bank account.

Online rewards sites have a whole variety of ways in which you can cash-out. Most of them offer payment via PayPal and/or gift vouchers.

But some of them also offer the option to cash-out via virtual Mastercard. The great advantage of this is you can spend the money on any site which accepts Mastercard (which is plenty) and, sometimes, it's more lucrative to cash-out by claiming a virtual Mastercard than doing so via PayPal.

For instance, Swagbucks will currently give you a £10 PayPal reward for 1600 points but they'll give you a £10 virtual Mastercard for just 1440 points. Clearly, it therefore makes sense to cash-out via virtual Mastercard rather than PayPal.

There's only one problem.

And that's that not every business accepts Mastercard payments and you can't pay a virtual Mastercard directly into your bank account. Clearly, a work-around is needed.

Fortunately, there is one. And that's that you can transfer money from a virtual Mastercard into your PayPal account and then pay that money into your bank account.

The way to do it is to log in to your PayPal account and, there, send a payment request to an email address you have that isn't linked to your PayPal account.

That done, log out of PayPal. Open the email account you just sent the payment request to, open the invoice PayPal has just sent to it and, through that, choose the option of paying without a PayPal account. Fill in the details of the virtual Mastercard then submit the payment.

Now, log back in to PayPal and you should find the money's been transferred into your PayPal account. PayPal will help itself to a small percentage of the payment, as a fee, but you'll still be better off than if you'd cashed out directly to PayPal.

By using this method, you squeeze that tiny bit more money out of your Swagbucks activities than you otherwise would have. And, of course, you don't have to use it just for Swagbucks. You can use this method for any site that gives a more generous payout to those cashing-out via virtual Mastercard.

Flash Render Quality changer. When you want to reduce the video strain on your computer.

I've mentioned before that there are various sites, like EarnHoney, Earnably, Perk, Branded Surveys and Swagbucks, which pay you to watch videos.

There can, however, be a problem with that.

And that's that some of the videos on such sites can use Flash, which means they may put a hefty strain on your computer, your browser and your RAM, slowing your machine down and causing it to heat up.

Fortunately, if you use Google Chrome, there's a way to help reduce that problem - and that's to add an extension called FRQc (Flash Render Quality changer) to it. Once that's on there, you can use it to choose the quality level of  any Flash-based videos that are playing in your browser and, therefore, reduce the level of strain they're putting on your machine.

Having had such videos bring my laptop grinding to a near-halt in the past, I know how useful such a feature can be. Therefore, you can find Flash Render Quality changer at the Google Chrome Web Store. This isn't an affiliate link and I won't make any money from you using it.

Curious Cat. The quick-paying survey app.

Curious Cat is a survey app I've just downloaded to my phone and given a quick try-out to.

It offers surveys from sources that'll be familiar to all regular survey takers, such as Samplicio and the somewhat unfortunately named Cint and is a quick, easy and no-nonsense way to do them.

As with all sites that offer such surveys, rewards are variable. Some are clearly generous and some aren't really worth bothering with. It all depends on how much time you're willing to spend earning a particular amount of money.

There's also the familiar problem of getting screened out of surveys, which clearly happens a lot.

Having said that, the ones I tried screened me out almost instantly, so at least not much time was wasted.

But easily the main selling point for Curious Cat is that you only need to earn £1 in order to cash-out, which is done via PayPal, and you receive your money almost instantly.

In the half hour since I downloaded it, I've earned 45 pence, so I've still got a way to go before a cash-out. From reviews I've seen online, it seems there are no problems with Curious Cat stumping up the money it owes you, so I'd see the app as being promising. I'll post more information as I have it.

Curious Cat is available for both IOS and Android. You can find out more and get the app by going to the official Curious Cat site, right here. This isn't a referral link, so I won't make any money if you use it.

Payment method: PayPal. Minimum payout: £1. Time for payouts to be processed: Instant. My rating: Too early to say yet but intriguing. DOWNLOAD CURIOUS CAT.