Awesome gifts without the price tag
The holidays are coming. For those of us who are spending mindfully this year, the planning starts earlier. It gets extra tricky when your family members “only want gift cards.” 😭 💸 . In fact, gift cards remain the most asked-for holiday gift. 93% of Americans will buy or receive a gift card this year.
Luckily, it’s possible to make this happen for much less than face-value. Even upwards of 40% less, depending what brands you want to buy.
Tip 1: Shop Discount Gift Cards
This week, WalletHub released their guide to 2018’s Best Gift Cards. Unlike in Christmases of yore, this guide lets you view a list of gift cards sortable by popularity, their average resale value (if you’re a seller), their average discount rate (if you’re a buyer). Looking at this list will reveal a couple of truths:
- You don’t need to pay full price for any mainstream retail good. Ever. On top of any sale, you can pay for goods with a gift card you bought at discount. The fine line is discerning when this makes sense and when it is a waste of effort.
- There is an unreal number of unused gift cards floating around out there. 45 billion dollars’ worth, in fact.
- Some of the most popular gift cards are cheap to buy at discount because the market is saturated with them.
Take this example, a Tale of Two Gift Cards, if you will:
Let’s say you have two gift cards you’d like to sell: a $100 gift card to Starbucks and a $100 gift card to Subway. Which will you get more money for?
A $100 Starbucks gift card will sell for $63.
A $100 Best Buy gift card will sell for $88.
Not what you expected, right? Starbucks is one of the most popular gift cards out there, so the sheer number of cards for sale drives the price down.
On the bright side, you can gamefy this disparity: some of the most sought-after brands are going to be way cheaper via gift card.
Popular sites are Cardpool, Gift Card Granny, and Raise. (To learn more, check out Wallet Hub’s full comparison of various discount card sites. )
I use Cardpool, which offers a wide selection and a lot of weekly deals. Raise is a great one, too.
Plus, by buying the card on my Citi cash back credit card, I still get 2% cash back on top of whatever discount I get.
Hint: Discount gift cards are an incredible way to save on vacations. You can buy airline, hotel, and even airBnB gift cards at a good discount.
Tip 2: Trade in old electronics.
Did you know you can turn your used electronics into gift cards? These buyback programs will take your stuff and turn it into gift cards to Apple, Target, Walmart, Amazon, Best Buy. A couple of them even offer cash.
Tip 3: Use credit card points.
A lot of credit card points allow you to redeem for discount gift cards. (They are “discount” because you get more dollar-value in gift cards than you will if you instead redeem for cash.) So if you already shop on, say, amazon, choose the $200 amazon gift card instead of the $160 in cash.
Tip 4: Trade in old gift cards — even partially used ones.
I’ll bet anything that you’ve got some old gift cards stashed in the back of your junk drawer. I have them, too. In the US alone, $40 billion in unused gift cards is floating in the ether out there. This number goes up by $1 billion each year.
A lot of them are places I’d never go: stores that don’t exist in my state or places that don’t carry anything I use.
Luckily, there’s an alternative to throwing an old gift card in the trash. There is a whole industry around buying up old gift cards and selling them to other people (see above). Companies like Raise and Cardpool will take your unwanted gift cards to stores you never shop at and give you Amazon or Target gift cards in exchange. If you just want cash, they’ll give you cash (slightly less than you’d get if you take the gift card option, but still decent). In the past, you had to do the exchange via a website, but now you can even trade in old gift cards in person.
Again, you won’t get a 1:1 amount of money from selling / trading your gift cards. But if you weren’t going to use the old one anyway, you may as well make SOMETHING off of it.
Selling online can be slightly better because you can “shop” sites until you find one that DEFINITELY accepts your gift card brand and immediately get a quote of how much they’ll give you. But if you have a bunch, it might just be easier to take them all to one place in person and see how many you can sell at once.
How to sell in person: If selling online is too overwhelming, just take your unwanted gift cards to the Target electronics department. Target accepts unwanted gift cards and sells them online through a partnership with Cardpool. The Target electronics department will swipe your gift cards and quote how much they could pay you for them. Note that Target only pays out in Target gift cards, not cash.
Target isn’t the only place you can trade in your cards — other stores like Safeway and King Soopers also offer this. See a map of exchange locations near you here.
How to sell online:
Go to a discount gift card website — I tried Cardpool— and click “sell gift cards.”
You can get an immediate quote of how much they’ll pay you — just enter the brand and the amount left on the gift card.
You can take a flat amount from them and mail them the gift card (they pay shipping), or you can sell the card yourself and potentially make more — but then you’ll have to ship the gift card yourself whenever it sells.
This $25 Legal Seafood gift card — which I can’t use because there is no Legal Seafood where I live now — will give me $14.50 in cash.
Tip 5: Check your corporate perks.
Many companies now offer discount retail marketplaces and health incentive gift cards to their employees.
This year my work is offering gift cards as incentives for making healthy living choices. I ignored the email about this because it seemed like one more thing on my to-do list, but one of my coworkers said it’s really good. After receiving my first $25 gift card just for walking to work, I was hooked.
I’ve spent the summer walking more (which I keep saying I want to do anyway…) and listening to healthy-living videos. My progress is synced to a points app called Jiff where I can track how much more exercise I need to do before I can get a gift card. So far I’ve redeemed about $200 in gift cards to Amazon, Target, and Starbucks.