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Are you looking for ways to stretch your dollar? 
Have you ever tried to get healthier and lose weight, but lost motivation before reaching your goals? Maybe you’ve gone as far as joining a gym or buying expensive exercise equipment—only for them go unused after your initial commitment.
But what if you could lose weight and make money doing it? Would that be enough motivation to stick with your exercise and diet regimen?
With HealthyWage, you can do just that. HealthyWage is an online company that uses cash prizes to make weight loss and fitness more fun and effective.
How Does HealthyWage Work?
HealthyWage is easy to use, and follows a 4-step process:
- Calculate Your Prize
- Set Your Weight Loss Goal and Timeline
- Make Your Bet
- Verify Your Starting Weight
- Lose the Weight (that’s the hard part!)
- Verify Your Results
- Win Money
Use the Prize Calculator
Start with HealthyWage’s free Prize Calculator to pick your weight loss goal and see how much you can win.
Important Note: Your minimum weight loss goal must be at least 10% of your body weight. For example, a 200 pound person would have to lose at least 20 pounds.
Your goal will include how many pounds you want to lose as well as the time frame (in months) in which you will lose them. You also will set an amount that you want to bet per month. As you adjust the variables, you’ll notice the prize range goes up and down based on your input. There’s no commitment yet, so play around with the calculator until you’re comfortable with the weight loss goal and prize range.
Pro Tip: Enter a dollar amount that hurts a little (or a lot). If you put in an amount that’s meaningless to you, you’ll be more likely to throw in the towel when the going gets tough.
Enter Your Stats
Next, you’ll be taken through several screens where you’ll enter specific data about yourself, including:
- Gender
- Height
- Current Weight (which will be verified later — no padding the scale!)
- Waist Size
See Your Prize Amount
In order to see your prize amount, which is based on the date you entered, you’ll need to enter an email address and create a password. To test this out, I entered a weight loss goal of 30 pounds in 9 months with a $50 bet monthly. My prize amount ended up being $500, or an 11% return on my “investment”.
HealthyWage uses “a proprietary algorithm” to calculate prizes so prizes might be different for 2 people entering similar information. I played around with different factors but it always presented a similar prize for me.
Just to be clear on how they’re calculating this, I’m putting in $450 ($50 x 9 months), and getting out $500 when I hit my goal — the $50 gain. To me, that seems like a lot of cash to put at risk for just a $50 gain, but your numbers might look different and there’s the motivation factor of not losing it too. (The average prize for goal achievers is $1,331.) Your prize winnings amount is set during this initial setup of your individual challenge, up to $10,000.
The next step is to make your bet, lose the weight, and get paid.
Making Your HealthyWage Bet
Once you’ve received your prize amount, you decide whether you want to place a bet. If you do, you will enter your credit card information. You can choose to pay all at once or make monthly payments.
Verifying Your Weight
This is one point I was really curious about. What’s to stop people from entering an inflated “starting weight” and cashing in when the pounds miraculously melt away? The way HealthyWage combats this is by requiring users to verify their initial weight before the challenge starts. (You’ll also do this at the end of the challenge to see if you hit your goal.)
There are two ways to do this:
- Download the HealthyWage mobile app (iOS or Android) and have one on their “referees” remotely witness your weigh-in.
- Make a short weigh-in video and upload it securely to the HealthyWage website.
The only equipment you need to use HealthyWage is a smartphone and a scale. There are no other weigh-ins during the process. HealthyWage doesn’t track your progress and doesn’t include a way for you to track progress through their website or app.
Finish your Challenge
Your HealthyWage challenge concludes on the appointed date given. To win the prize, you just need to achieve your weight loss goal in the timeframe you set up. As mentioned earlier, your weight will be verified at the conclusion of the challenge. If you hit your goal, you’ll earn the prize. If not, you lose the money you wagered on yourself.
The Science Behind HealthyWage
Academic research at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania found that:
- Cash rewards can increase the effectiveness of weight loss programs.
- People are more likely to take action when their own money is at risk.
HealthyWage relies on two scientific rules about human behavior: incentives and loss aversion. In simpler terms, the company uses both a “carrot” and a “stick” to motivate participants.
Participants have “skin in the game” by having to wager real money on their weight loss success. (Though tons of people sign up for gym memberships that they never use so in a sense they are losing money as well.) There’s something about wagering money, though, that motivates people differently. In fact, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who have a financial incentive to lose weight are five times more likely to reach their weight loss goals than people with no money at stake. And it seems to be working — last year HealthyWage participants combined to drop over 850,000 pounds!
How Do I Get Paid by HealthyWage?
Upon winning a challenge, you will earn HW points, valued at one dollar each. HW points will be added to your account by the evening of your prize announcement. With your HW points, you can do a few things:
- Request a payout.
- Use HW Points to join a new challenge.
- Use HW Points to pay installments on a current challenge (this requires emailing HealthyWage’s accounting department to set up).
HealthyWage pays challenge winners by paper check or PayPal. According to their website, there is a processing fee for a paper check of $7.00. HealthyWage does not apply a fee for PayPal payouts, but standard PayPal fees of 2.9% + $0.30 may apply.
4 Other Ways to Make Money with HealthyWage: Challenges and Referrals
Besides their HealthyWager Individual Weight Loss Bet, HealthyWage offers people other ways to make money. This is done through various individual and team challenges. You can participate in up to 10 challenges at the same time — a chance to potentially double or triple dip your earning power for the same weight loss.
1. Jackpot Challenges
Available as an individual or team challenge, with Jackpot challenges your money goes into a pot. If you (or your team with the team challenge) loses 6% of your body weight at the end of the challenge, you win the pot.
2. Step Challenge
Connect your step counting device to participate in a step challenge. You can compete as an Individual or as part of a team to try to achieve specific step goals to earn a share of the pot.
3. $10,000 Team Challenge
Teams of 5 compete to lose the greatest percentage of weight to win cash prizes. The top prize is $10,000.
4. Refer Your Friends
It’s easier to make lifestyle changes if your friends are on the same journey. For every friend you refer to make their own HealthyWager, you’ll each earn a $40 prize boost.
That means if you can find 5 friends to join you, you could add $200 to your winnings.
Is HealthyWage a Scam?
Many people have questioned whether HealthyWage is an ethical company or a scam. They’re turned off by the fact that it resembles gambling. On the surface, HealthyWage seems to profit off the fact that the majority of people simply don’t stick with diets or fitness plans.
There are reasons why HealthyWage is a legit business, though. First, they have been around since 2009 so they have longevity. They weren’t formed just to profit off people. In fact, much of the money made off lost wagers goes toward payouts for other challenges. (HealthyWage also makes money from sponsorships, corporate partnerships, and various fees—not just from users who fail to hit their health goals.)
Co-founder David Roddenberry says that HealthyWage “success rates vary, with between 25% and 40% of participants actually winning their bets.” “If 100% of the people lost the weight,” he added, “We would be absolutely thrilled.” (Though I’m sure that would hurt the cash flow of the company!)
Although HealthyWage’s model seems like a gamble, it’s different because participants have control of the outcome. They decide if they will put in the work and stick with their health plan. The program is set up to offer higher prize payouts to people with large amounts of weight to lose, which can be hard to accomplish.
BONUS: Check out these other health deals currently available while you are here and save some money!
