Gifting Yourself Gift Cards

Posted by: Michael S. | Dec 22,2007


Just a couple of days left of Christmas shopping.  It’s this time of year where you might just say, Ah, nevermind, I’m just getting them a gift card.  It’s the easiest gift to buy and shipping costs almost nothing.  

Turns out you can use gift cards to your own advantage.  Check out this post, showing how you can benefit from rewards programs on gift cards, just as you can benefit from cash in on the rewards plans on credit cards.  To sum it up, this person bought $2000 worth of gift cards for Home Depot at their local supermarket, which had a promotion for a discount on gas for $ spent.  It’s a fairly extreme solution he devised, but it goes to show that you can get good money back on promotions if you play the system.  

Using gift cards in this manner saved him more money on gas than, say, using a gas station-affiliated credit card, because he was spending so much money all at once.  To get the same payback using a gas card could take months.  This way, he could just buy a short-term gift card and get immediate payback, as opposed to a credit card, which can sometimes take the greater part of a year to build up adequate rewards points.  

Nope, it’s not always easy to cash in on rewards points – whether it’s through a gift card system or through using rewards cards – but if you’re diligent enough, you could end up gifting yourself hundreds of dollars.  To do so, you need to keep apprised of all local promotional offers, and it works best if you’re making a large purchase using the card.  That’s the basis for any promotional offer: you get back what you put in.  

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