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Oct 27, 2008 10:37 pm US/Eastern
Earn Up To A Million By Being Married For 30 Years
SEATTLE, Wash. (CBS4) ―
How would you like to make up to a million dollars by staying married for thirty years? That's an offer from a new program called uTango and in today's economy, it's enticing quite a few couples.
Carmelina and Daniel Rakiec are newlyweds, married just over a month. Naturally, they're optimistic about a long future together. "God has placed us together and we're going to work really hard," Carmelina said.
If they stay together thirty years, they could get a big payoff through a program from a Seattle company called uTango. They could get up to a million dollars.
uTango founder Jim Miller described the system. "We have three different plans...the quarter million dollar plan, the half a million dollar plan and the million dollar plan."
uTango members accumulate points by shopping at over 300 merchants located on their website. For example, if you're going for the million dollars, you have to rock up 120,000 points a year. On average, that's $20,000.
Daniel and Carmelina picked the lowest plan to fit into their newlywed budget. They need to spend about $5,000 dollars a year. They also signed up for the uTango credit card, which gives them extra points for every dollar they spend.
"It's not too hard to accumulate points," the couple said. "I think the biggest thing we did on line were with the wedding, our wedding invitations and our hotels."
A bigger enticement: you don't have to wait thirty years to get paid. There are rewards at ten year intervals. "You get up to $10 grand in 10 years and $100 thousand in 20 years". You can also get yearly cash rewards of $800, depending on how much you spend. It's free to sign up, provided a person is single, engaged or married less than three years.
You may think that if your marriage lasts, it's a simple way to make big bucks. But a consumer expert says it pays to look a little closer. "How many people are going to follow through on a 30 year commitment and buy 10's of thousands of dollars a year through one website?" Edgard Dworsky is the founder of ConsumerWorld.org.
"They reserve the right to change the terms of their plan at any time," he pointed out. The reward amounts are not necessarily guaranteed, either. The money is invested in the stock market; as we've seen recently, that fluctuates wildly just in one day.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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