 In a previous article on "Raising miles at Walmart" I had shown how you could you potentially reduce the fee portion of Visa/MasterCard to even less than "zero". In that article the focus was on "Raise" as that was one of the gift card site where you could easily find the Walmart gift card at 2 to 2.5 % discount. Since then I have seen similar discounts offered by Cardpool as well as Ebay although I prefer Cardpool because of ease of use. The important thing to note is if the "gift card resale" site you are about to use provides any cash-back rebates through any rebates portal. Cardpool is also one of the Gift Card Resale site which provides cash-back through bunch of portals, one of which is TopCashBack. You could also check out other rebate portals and a good place to start your search for best rebate portal would be to search for the merchant at "Cashbackholic". Make sure you read through the terms of the cash-back portal as each one of them operate differently and have some limits of minimum amount of rebate you need to accrue before it becomes payable.
Walmart gift card at Cardpool: Cardpool consistently provides the Walmart gift card at 2.5% discount in addition to 2% cash-back rebate going through TopCashBack ( Note: The rebate is only available until you reach $1k in purchases so make sure you read the terms through). You can combine upto 4 walmart gift card to make a purchase of Visa/MasterCard. A purchase of $200 in Walmart gift card would cost $195 and provide a rebate of $3.9 (2% of $195). Thus you get a $200 Walmart gift card at a cost $191.1 out of pocket cost thus having a discount of $8.9. Considering that a $200 Visa/MasterCard gift card costs $6.88 in fees you would still be ahead by $2.02 on this one. So by going through this route you would have purchased 195 points/miles and made a small profit of $2.02 as well on your credit card spend. Walmart gift card at Ebay: Another approach is to purchase the Walmart gift card from Ebay. Generally you would be able to find "Buy it now" deals for 2.5% discount and on top of it you would get 2% back from Ebay bucks. As you can see that you would save almost similar amount of money as you do from Cardpool but there are few problems you should be award of as mentioned below:
So, go ahead and accumulate those miles without any fees and enjoy your award travel. (Note: If you open your TopCashBack account using above mentioned links, I would get a small referral bonus. I do appreciate your support. Thanks.)
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 Most of you holding BlueBird Debit Card would be familiar with Walmart for loading it up. Since there is a cost associated with the purchase of Visa / MasterCard, which could range from ~$4 to $6 per card the ideal strategy is to purchase the gift cards with credit cards that earn 2x or more miles/points per $ spent. But assuming you want to accumulate miles/points on the card which only earns 1x miles/points spending $5 for a purchase of $500 gift card would entail the cost of buying miles at 1 cent/mile or point. If you are on a lookout on how to minimize this cost then there are quite a few strategies available. The most common with least hassle are using Chase Gift Cards or using Plink but they have their own limitation's. In this post I am describing yet another strategy on bringing down the cost to zero without too much of work involved.
Bring on Raise! Raise is a website for gift card buy and sale. This site is interesting because they regularly have Walmart e-gift card for sale at 2% to 3% discount. On top of it they do provide $5 off first purchase of $125 for new customer as well as do have promotion's now and then for $5 off discounts on $75 or more. The best part is you could make a purchase through cash back site such as Topcashback which regularly offers 2% to 3% of the card value as cash back. Let's assume the hypothetical purchase scenario where you make a purchase of $200 Walmart gift card without considering any special promotion or $5 discount. Assuming you are making a purchase at 2% discount and Topcashback provides another 2%, thus your out of pocket expense to purchase $200 Walmart gift card would be "$200 - $4 (2%) - $3.92 (2% of $196) = $192.08. Saving of $7.92.. That's not much of a saving unless you read next.. Bring on Walmart! Walmart sells visa gift cards of $200 for $206.88 ($6.88 is the fee for $200 visa gift card). The important thing to note is currently you can use Walmart e-gift card to make the purchase of these visa gift cards. You can combine 4 such e-gift cards for single purchase. There is no shipping fee for this and the transaction would go through without any issues as you are using Walmart's currency. Combine the above two.. So, now if you combine Raise and Walmart together you will notice that your out of pocket fee is (-$1.04) for generating 200 points/miles using a credit card which gives only 1x. You can then use your favorite BlueBird Debit card to unload the $200 Visa gift card using your favorite Walmart again and thus generate free miles/points easily. Note: If you use the Raise or TopCashBack link above I would get a small commission which I greatly appreciate. Thanks for reading!  I wrote before on how easy it is to meet the minimum spend requirement using MoneyPak and AMEX Serve Card. Now of-course with the onset and availability of Pin based Visa/Mastercard we have new ways on meeting the minimum spend to get that new credit card sign-up bonus. Below are few possible ways on meeting your spend requirement with minimal cost to you.
Method 1: Using BlueBird AMEX Card: Using BlueBird Debit is by far the best way to run-up the spend meet of up to $5k/month easily. The method involves buying Visa Gift Card at stores which allow you to buy using a credit card. You can also use credit cards which bonuses specific category of purchase like grocery (Blue Cash Preferred with 6x), grocery+drug store+gas (ThankYou Preferred for 1st year with 5x) or Office Stores (Ink Bold or Ink Plus with 5x), that would increase your earning potential tremendously . The method involves setting up the pin on your Visa gift card, going to your nearest Walmart and loading the BlueBird Debit Card with the Visa gift card at any of the Money-Center Kiosk or customer service counter. You can load $1k/day upto $5/month on the card. You cannot have more than one BlueBird Card, but of-course if you have spouse you can have a card on her name as well and thus increase the amount of available loading to $10k/month. Method 2: Buying Money Orders at Walmart and other stores which accept Visa Gift Cards: You can use Visa Gift Cards to buy Money Orders at lot of places including Walmart. Since most places which has this service requires a pin-based debit card you should be good to purchase Money Orders using Visa Gift Cards. You can make these money orders on your spouse name which can be deposited in his/her account or if you are renting a house you can make money order on your land-lord's name as well for your rental payment. Method 3: Buying Green Dot MoneyPak: You can still find MoneyPak with $0 fee at many pharmacy stores which will allow you to make the purchase using a Visa Gift Card with pin. This is of-course is YMMV but can help to liquidate the Visa Gift Card by eventually using MoneyPak to load to variety of prepaid cards including MyGreenDot which allows free MoneyPass ATM withdrawal's and a great way of meeting minimum spend. Of-course the incentive of using Visa Gift Card for buying MoneyPak is that Visa Gift Cards are available in wide variety of stores and thus you can use a credit card which bonuses your purchase of Visa Gift Card and thus multiply your points/cash-back earned. P.S. You can of-course meet your minimum spend requirement with $0 cost or make even a profit by purchasing Visa Gift Card online from giftcardmall through cash back portals like BigCrumbs and TopCashBack. FrequentMiler has a wonderful article on this which would be of your interest. Disclosure: I do not earn any commission on above credit card links but I do earn a referral bonus if you use my BigCrumbs or TopCashBack links. |
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