Category: Gift Cards

Keep the following on your radar for the holiday weekend, but make sure you take some time to relax too (don’t forget that we’re starting busy season for reselling, gift cards or otherwise so save some energy for the points treadmill):

1. On Wednesday I wrote about how the Point.app debit card was a nice vector from Venture Capitalist investment funds to your wallet. Well, it looks like that’s going to be going on for a long time: They just raised $46.5 Million dollars from two major venture capital funds.

On a likely related note, Point has a new streak going for $30 back after making a purchase a day for five days in a row, provided those purchases add up to $200 or more. This is easily combined with the Target 10x or Nike 15x offer running at Point right now, so if you procrastinated on those you’re in luck! Max them out with a gift card for resale to bump you well over $200 in spend, then set up Debbit to make four more transactions of $1.00 at Amazon for the following four days.

If you don’t have Point.app, use a referral link because the normal sign-up bonus is $10, but with a referral it’s $100. There’s no credit check since it’s a debit card. If you need a referral ask a friend and make their day, but if you don’t know anyone with Point reach out to me and I’ll share mine.

2. TravelBloggerBuzz’s post for yesterday had two more hotel promotions in addition to Wednesday’s Marriott promotion. So, do the following now in case you end up staying at one of these hotels:

If you do end up at a Best Western, my condolences. At least you’re not at a Marriott Courtyard.

3. When will the madness end? Starting Sunday, Staples will have fee-free $200 Visa Gift Cards, limit 5 per transaction. I may sit this one out, I’m very much running out of bonused office supply spend capacity and there isn’t a Staples near me. (thanks to kawnipi)

4. Kroger’s 4x fuel points when purchasing gift cards promotion starts today and runs through Monday evening. Rates on everything related to this promotion have crept up from the last round, so it’s a great time to knock out some grocery store spend and potentially earn money doing it.

An old, green, monochrome air traffic control radar screen centered on an airport
Radar screen showing my local Kroger parking lot and gift card rack.

1. Another week, another Point debit card offer: 15x at Nike between now and Monday September 6, limit 5000 points (or $333 in spend). I’ll buy a $330 gift card for resale at 93.5% and a net cost of 85%.

Point has been a great middle-man for transferring money from venture capitalist bank accounts into our wallets. I have to wonder when these offers will die, but it could be a while because VC money is plentiful right now — especially for FinTech companies.

As usual with Point, sign up for a new account using a referral link for the best bonus (currently $100 after spending $1,000). Make a friend’s day by using theirs, but if you don’t know anyone with a link you can reach out to me and I’ll share mine.

2. Marriott Bonvoy has its fall promotion out for stays between September 14 and December 12. Register here right now in case you end up at a Marriott property in the next several months. Also, my condolences if you do.

What’s the offer you ask? Answer: A slap in the face, but also 1,500 bonus points added to your Bonvoy account for each stay at a Marriott (or 4,500 if the property is all inclusive). Ok, ok i kid: a slap in the face is complimentary with every Marriott stay.

My welcome gift as a Bonvoy elite at my last Marriott Courtyard stay.

There’s a lot of opportunity kicking off the week, let’s hope it continues through Labor Day weekend (which, by the way, will likely be a great weekend for gift card reselling). Let’s dive in:

1. Office Depot/OfficeMax is back with my favorite promo: $15 off of $300 or more in Visa Gift Cards, now through Saturday. This is a $1.10 money maker when buying two regular $200 Visa Gift Cards. If you try slightly harder, say with the Everywhere variety of Visa Gift Cards and by linking your card to Dosh it becomes a $15.10 money maker without considering credit card rewards. If you go for the Everywhere cards note that they’re locked to specific merchants, but some of them are broad enough to make liquidation a breeze.

Do you have any burner cell phone numbers? Perhaps at least one for each credit card you have that bonuses at Office Supply stores? Create a Dosh account for each of them so you can scale the daily Dosh $10 max.

2. Dean let me know that Brex is back with a 110,000 points bonus through a partnership with Peyd. These points cash out directly via Brex at a penny a piece, or you can transfer them 1:1 to eight different airlines, some of which are actually useful (FlyingBlue, Asia Miles, and LifeMiles all have a unique sweet spots).

I signed up for Brex when it was first available and my biggest surprise with it is that the account is actually useful on an ongoing basis, not just for the sign up bonus. I’ve been happy with it for payroll hacking and for MS in certain categories.

Reportedly Brex will also let you sign up with Sole Proprietorship businesses now, but they may ask to see a tax return with a Schedule C.

3. Stop & Shop and Giant stores have 3x GO Rewards on Mastercard purchases, and 10x on Apple gift card purchases this week. I really like the Apple angle with resale rates hovering at about 93%, especially when combined with a credit card that bonuses at grocery stores.

Waiting for the light to turn plaid to drive into the OfficeMax parking lot.

Apparently a bunch of marketing teams got together and colluded to make Wednesday, August 25 the official promotion day for travel hacking. Here are the results:

1. Simon has a promotion running for 40% off of gift cards with code FS40AUG21. Don’t buy with an American Express, but other cards are fair game. For the best bang for your buck, go with $1,000 Visa gift cards.

Tip: If you haven’t yet been approved for a volume account with Simon and you want to unlock the $1,000 Visa gift cards, I’d recommend putting “Manufactured Spend” on the application as the reason for applying. Yes, I’m serious, and yes, it works.

2. Register here for Hilton HHonors double points for non-AmEx Hilton credit card holders, or triple points if you do hold a HHonors credit card. The promotion runs through September 7 and December 31.

3. Alaska Airlines has a flash sale running today for travel between September 7 and December 15. Because the dates cover some holiday travel, I’d suggest taking a peek if you’re still waiting to book travel for the holiday season.

4. Register here for 1,000 bonus AA miles for every “qualifying” stay between September 3 and December 21, which as far as I can tell means every points earning eligible stay in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia (cash, or cash+points).

5. The Point debit card has a 10x boost for Target, up to $500 in spend. This amounts to $50 cash back. Can you guess my play? If you said buy a gift card for resale, you’ve won our grand prize!

If you want the Point card, use a referral because the sign up bonus is bigger that way.

A checklist with the options "Loser", "Winner", and "Other" Winner is selected.
Your quiz scorecard.

It’s shaping up to be a great weekend for getting out there and ginning-up some spend. Alternatively, if you’re like me you’ve burnt out on manufactured spend after a week and a half of Kroger’s 4x Fuel Points promotion it’s a good weekend for chillin’. You decide:

1. Staples is selling fee free Visa Gift Cards again starting on Sunday and running through a week from Saturday, limit 5 per customer (or per transaction in most cases). Just make sure you have a liquidation method before you load up on these.

2. Simon Mall online is having a flash sale for 50% off of Visa gift card fees using promo code FSAUG50 through this evening. These are an interesting way to meet minimum spend for second tier banks (definitely not for American Express, you won’t earn points and the spend won’t count toward a sign up bonus). If by some miracle you have one of the card numbers for yesterday’s Bank of America shenanigans handy this could be a great way to run up a balance for payment shenanigans on those cards.

In case you’re not aware, you can get $1,000 face value Visa gift cards with your name printed on the front online at Simon. Frequent Miler has a good writeup here with the basics. As with the Staples, make sure you’ve got a path toward liquidation of these gift cards before going big.

3. Is your Brex cash card sitting idle? I’d understand if so, mine certainly was for quite a while. That’s changed though — I wanted to drop a reminder for those who might have ride-share like expenses, real or otherwise: Brex has been faithfully awarding 8x on ride-sharing services for me.

Brex has a new sign-up bonus of 80,000 miles (or $800 if you’d rather cash out) with $9,000 spend within a short 30 days. It has no credit check but does require a real business. Note that this link randomly seems to offer 7x on ride-sharing services. (Thanks to Rapid Travel Chai for the link)

4. M1 Finance has released their upcoming credit card’s rewards structure, and there are a few doozies for manufactured spend in there. You can see the full list here.

How I’ll be rolling this weekend.

Happy Thursday.

Simon

Simon has a promotional code for 48% off of all fees when ordering Visa and Mastercard gift cards online, use code FS48JUL. Don’t use an American Express to buy these; sure, it’ll work but you won’t get any points or meet any spend thresholds.

I usually prefer to MS just about everything on my American Express cards so I in turn tend to ignore Simon, but now I have a need to run up a bigger balance on my Citi card portfolio and some of my normal methods aren’t currently cutting it. And no, this isn’t because of the AA mileage transfer partnership.

Southwest

2. Southwest is having a decent fare sale that ends today. Yes, they have those a lot, but this one is interesting because it encompasses the Thanksgiving holiday season and it’s likely that the free change window will pass over Thanksgiving in the next several days. So, let’s get hacking!

For a quick primer on the Southwest free change window, see Spring Break, Southwest Style.

Kroger

3. Kroger 4x Fuel Points on gift cards is back, and yesterday I saw Best Buy gift card rates jump as high as 97% for about 12 hours. Let me tell you, I dropped what I was doing and made a run to several Krogers in my area. If your gift card buyers weren’t offering at least 96% yesterday, consider whether you should seek another buyer?

Just don’t forget to add the coupon to your Kroger account and make sure you use the right Alt-ID. I don’t know why I was off of my game yesterday but I managed to do each of those once. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Bonus

Bonus content: Delta seems to have devalued domestic SkyMiles award prices yesterday. Hopefully it’s a glitch, but if not, you can always get at least once cent per mile with Delta’s Pay with Miles as long as you have at a co-branded Delta American Express card, so always do the math!

Maxwell’s Equations can be used to figure out SkyMiles redemption values. Don’t see it? You’ll have to trust me on that one, or just assume they’re worth a penny in the worst case.

1. Check Office Depot or Office Max stores for $15 off of $300 in Visa Gift Cards between now and July 31, which will net you $1.10 or more on the purchase itself. Also, note that the “Everywhere” versions of these cards can be a bigger bang for your buck but will work at a smaller set of retailers. Finally, make sure you link your card with Dosh too. It’s not supposed to pay out on gift card purchases but almost always does anyway, netting you even more.

I’ve been waiting for this to appear for a while and I’m glad it finally showed up. I know where I’ll be visiting a few times a day each day this week. (Thanks to GC Galore)

2. GoBank cards have been a good way to liquidate gift cards at a Walmart register, fee free. About a week and a half ago, Walmart started charging $3.74 per load which made the card much less useful. That appears to have been a mistake and we’re back to fee free loads of up to $1,000 again.

Is it a coincidence that the above two bullets showed up on the same day?

Is it a coincidence that these lines are coincident? Ugh, math jokes.

For the second time this year, Flyertalk had a unique find that I haven’t seen anywhere else. What even is 2021? I used to read Flyertalk every single day, and now I’m lucky to visit once a week. Anyway:

1. There is a Hyatt Globalist status challenge available to anyone right now, and you’ve got through November 30th to register. This one is slightly harder than normal because you’ll have to call a full service Hyatt’s sales department and ask to register, so you can’t just clicky-clicky your way to status. When you register you’ll get Explorist status through 2021 no matter what. But you can earn status through February 2023 pretty easily:

  • Stay 10 nights to keep Explorist
  • Stay 20 nights to earn Globalist

My usual advice is that Globalist is absolutely worthwhile and valuable, and lower status with Hyatt is barely worth mentioning and you can replicate most of it with a nice “please” to the front desk at check-in. (Why yes, I have been called cynical before. Why do you ask? Actually, maybe they just called me apathetic, I can’t be bothered to remember which.)

2. Meijer has a $5 reward for every $50 spent on gift cards, up to 10 per account through August 14. I hope if you live in Meijer land that you’ve gotten a few MPerks accounts by now. Make sure to add the offer to your account UPDATE: MJ let me know that there’s no need to add the offer to your account on this round.

Do note that several gift cards are ineligible, but Home Depot and Best Buy are both eligible so there’s lots of juice to squeeze. (Thanks to Stephen at GC Galore)

I’m also too apathetic to create funny caption.