Posted by Updated 9/20/19. I am now a Healthy Wage affiliate. I will henceforth be using my blog to promote Healthy Wage as the great weight loss motivating service that I believe it is.
You will see plenty of detail about the service and what it has to offer, and how things work as I have experienced them.
I also will plan to tell the stories of winners. If you won and would like to be featured, please get in touch.
I will have links to the site—including those for launching HealthyWagers and entering $10,000 jackpots. If you click on the links and sign for either, I get commissions.
I updated this post a bit. I will be further updating by adding content from the Healthy Wage websites, and other advertising material, because I am allowed to now.
The question in the title did enter my mind when I learned of Healthy Wage back in January.
I was about three months into losing weight at the time. The site popped up in my Facebook feed from somewhere. I looked into it and joined one Sunday. I then entered a Facebook group created by a YouTuber who had lost 51 pounds last year and made over $1,300 in profit on a 6 month bet.
I did a 6 month HealthyWager myself. I bet the house minimum, but I won that bet. I should have bet more, but I didn’t have enough trust at that time—partially in the service and partially in myself. In the meantime, to make up for the paltry stakes, I enrolled in about 15 12-week 6% challenges (I call them the “minis”) and won more on them collectively than on the HealthyWager.
I then started a second HealthyWager, again for minimum stakes—this time because the odds they offered were so poor. I used a referral code from my wife to boost them, and I did more minis. The HealthyWager finishes in December.
By now I have extensive involvement with the company and with various online communities on Facebook, including people with various degrees of affiliation with the company. I also have investigated the calculator that determines the odds for each HealthyWager and how various factors affect it, including biometric inputs, bet definitions, and referral boosts. I have spent a lot of time with the app and website, which often operate less than flawlessly; and I have dealt with customer service many times.
The great stuff—and the only relevant stuff
So first, let me start by saying that, according to my observations, the company makes its commitments to identifying winners fairly and paying them out in a timely manner. The HealthyWagers get credited to players’ accounts (in “HW Points” form, 1 point = US$1) in 2-7 days, and the payments always go out at 1:30 pm. The company also answers questions thoughtfully and thoroughly, particularly with questions about Form 1099-MISC for income tax.
The website is clear on deadlines and weight requirements for making the bets. The verified video process generally works well, and the refs are great at getting things right.
That’s the good part. Once you get past the marketing, it’s good. And it’s good enough for me.
The marketing—a mixed bag, a pet peeve mostly
My big beef with the company is with some of the marketing tactics it employs. I will provide a couple of examples.
Let’s start with the primary marketing message: the $10,000 maximum prize.
It’s at the top of the Facebook channel for Healthy Wage. It also appears in the link that you automatically make for your own Facebook page when you click on the Facebook icon in the Invite tab of the app.
And it is 99.44% pure bullshit.
From a recent YouTube ad:
REAL CASH! UP TO $10,000
Check out the fine print on the second screenshot:
The caption says:
The “prize includes a winner’s bet plus profit added by Healthy Wage. Most people do not have a $10,000 prize because it is only available to people who are quite obese, commit to a large amount of weight loss and make a large bet.
All of this is actually true. This is why I used the term “bullshit” and not “lie.” I don’t believe Healthy Wage is trying to hide the truth from anyone. Instead, they want people to refrain from thinking critically and to act emotionally when considering this sort of endeavor.
What my calculator explorations revealed to me is that there are only three ways to get a $10,000 prize:
- Be a morbidly obese woman (330-350 or more) betting about $2,500 to lose 190+ pounds, preferably in 18 months
- Be slightly less obese than that but make up for it by recruiting tons (literally?) of friends and scoring referral bonuses
- Make a sucker bet—put so much money down that most of it is merely pushed back to you if you win, and not doing any real work
I wrote “woman” above. Men can’t get close to $10,000. Healthy Wage limits net gain for men to about $16-$19 per pound pledged, while women get $30-$34 per pound pledged. Even if a 550-pound man pledged to lose 350 pounds or so, he can’t realistically do that in 18 months.
Women generally can earn more than men. In the YouTube ad, every person featured but one is a woman. And the man featured got the return shown only because he captured $800 in referral boosts, which is unrealistic for most people. I will discuss the featured individuals and their returns in a later post.
Another marketing technique I have a beef with is the Facebook posts and the comment threads. When I first joined Healthy Wage, these threads were littered with users posting their referral links to score boosts. That’s great for new users because they can find boosts easily, but it made the Facebook feed look scammy. During a FB Messenger convo with the site administrator i learned that overpowering of links causes the page to be flagged as spam.
This summer, Healthy Wage instituted a program where about 10 people were selected as Healthy Wage Ambassadors, and who had the exclusive right to post referral links in the Facebook page comment threads. Others can post whatever they want except that they are barred from posting referral links.
While this appears to solve the spam-flagging problem, in my opinion the comment threads still look largely like crap. Every thread now has the same four or five people putting up referral links, no matter what the subject of the post is.
Where this really bothers me is when a big winner is featured. Sometimes it’s an Ambassador, and others it would be someone I never saw before. In either case, the comment thread is filled with links from the same subset of Ambassadors—whether one of them was featured in the post itself or was not.
It would be much better for there to be only one referral link on these types of posts that highlight a winner: namely, the winner’s own code. We all submit to having our photos being made available for social media promotion when we sign on to the service, if they are uploaded to the chat platform or in the e-certifications for winning a challenge. So in return, a winner who gets featured in the social media channels should get a piece of the action by having his link featured.
It would be an additional incentive to doing well with your bet, to have the chance at getting a little extra by being featured this way. Instead, i see the same five semi-professional hucksters begging for muh referrals.
Coda — and my upcoming contributions
But in the end, all that stuff an annoyance. What’s important is that you set up your bet properly and have a plan to execute it. Then you execute the plan, collect the money, and enjoy the new life that he weight loss has provided you.
I would like to help you out in my own way, which is why I am doing this blog. And it is why I became and affiliate for Healthy Wage. So I can shine a light on what’s great about the company—and how it can change your life if you plan for success and execute that plan.
Weight Betting Odds 