Using Gift Cards to Save Money

Did you know the Internet has a booming second hand market for gift cards?

Probably the best place to start your search for Gift Cards is Gift Card Granny!

It covers the biggest gift card exchanges on the web.  (Including ebay, but I tend to shy away from buying cards off of ebay.) Basically, from there you can find who has the best price on that unwanted gift card for that store you'll never go to or who has the best price on a gift card at a place you plan on buying something.  Since cards tend to sell at a discount, they beat the pants off the less than 1% you can get out of most savings accounts.

So say you have a big project at the house and you are going to spend $500.00 on it.  Well, head over to Gift Card Granny, do a quick search on Home Depot and you find a list of gift cards.  There are some variations due to rounding, but they seem to be going for around a 11% discount.  So you buy enough cards to cover a little less than your whole project, so you don't have a funky balance hanging around, just for simplicity's sake we'll go with $500, because the gift card can be used to cover tax too, at an average of 9% discount, you could buy those $500 worth of gift cards for $455.  There's $45 you didn't have to spend on your project.

One of  my favorite things to do is to flip gift cards for things I will buy regularly.  Something I know I am going to use is gas.  If you start by looking up BP or Shell, you'll see there is high demand for these gift cards, so they only go for the tiny discount of 1%.  We can do better than that!

So many places sell gift cards these days, you just need to find the right place.  Sears/Kmart are good examples, both locations sell BP and Shell gift cards.  Their gift cards are going for 5 to 6 %.  So you buy a Kmart gift card, once it gets mailed to you, you head out to Kmart and then buy a Shell gift card with your Kmart gift card.

Some places won't let you buy a gift card with a gift card.  And some places say you can't but then they ring up just fine at the register.  It takes a little trial and error, but hopefully you can find a deal that works for you.

Note: Be very careful about Walgreens Gift Cards.  Many gift card sites treat gift cards and cards for store credit interchangeably.  If the card you receive is actually for store credit, you will not receive Walgreens Balance Rewards on your purchases.

Know any tricks with gift cards?  Let me know in the comments.