EARNING MILES WITH GIFT CARD BUY/SELL

Flying the airlines used to be the traditional way of collecting miles on airlines for that dream trip, but thanks to the advent of "mileage earning" credit cards (where you earn miles/points based on spend on the credit card) it has become easier than ever to earn those miles to redeem for your dream vacation trip or that future trip which you have been planning for a while. With the help of credit cards, some effort from your end and lot of available techniques you could rack up those miles for your "award travel redemption". Some of these techniques are:

• Buying Visa/MasterCard at the stores using credit cards (if possible at stores which bonuses purchases) at minimal cost and converting them to Money Orders or reloading them fee free to cards such as SERVE or BLUEBIRD.
• Buying American Express Gift Cards using Shopping Portals to cover the "card fees" as well as the "liquidating costs" by either loading them to AMEX Target Card where available (and withdrawing the money from ATM) or buying "Visa/MasterCard" in turn which then be converted to Money Orders.
• Buying/Selling gift cards by taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities that exist to essentially earn miles/points in that transaction with minimum out of pocket cost ( or loss).

Let's see few methods which you can follow to generate the miles/points on the credit card of your choice by "Buying/Selling gift cards".

Method 1: Buy gift card online for merchants that awards points/miles for their gift card purchase and exchanging those gift card in store for more valuable gift card.
A common example where above method is used is Sears. Sears usually awards miles/points for purchase of their physical gift cards through various portals. For example if you earn 10 miles/$ spend ( or 10% Cash-back) on purchase of sears gift cards through the portal, later on which you can use to purchase Visa/MasterCard in the store (provided the store sells those and cashier is fine doing it). You could also use Sears gift card to buy other merchant gift cards such as Amazon or Shell (provided they are available and cashier is fine doing it). Purchasing $1k of Sears gift card would generate 10k miles/points ( or $100 cash-back) which could help you for that future trip.

Method 2: Buy gift cards online at discounted rate and sell these gift cards at minimal loss on "gift card exchange sites".
A common example of these would be to Buy gift cards online on Ebay when Ebay bonuses it by giving percentage discount of 8% or more or 4X or greater bonus Ebay Bucks. These could be then sold to various gift card re-sellers. You could scan through "giftcardgranny" for the resell value you would get before you buy the gift card on Ebay so that you know your profit/loss before hand.

Method 3: Buy discounted gifts cards online for merchants that allow buying Visa/MasterCard or other better value merchant gifts card in-store or online using their gift cards. 
Again Sears would qualify here for in-store gift card purchase using Sears gift card. There are other stores which would allow you to do that. A useful place to browse for this is at Frequent Miler Laboratory. Walmart used to allow using their gift cards to purchase Visa/MasterCard online, but no longer does that.

Hope these data helps you to get going in your miles quest for the upcoming trip.

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