Easy and free ways to liquidate prepaid gift cards from Office Max

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By now many of my readers will have seen information about the current Office Max promotion, running through December 27, 2014, for $20 off $300 or more in Visa or MasterCard gift cards purchased in-store.

Since $200 Visa and MasterCard gift cards come with a $6.95 activation fee, buying two will net you $6.10 in value even before accounting for any credit card rewards earned on the purchase, while buying one $200 and one $100 gift card would net you $7.10, again before accounting for credit card rewards.

While it's possible to simply integrate these cards into your existing workflow of manufactured spending, this deal is so good I think folks who, for reasons of geography, time, or inclination, don't typically manufacture spend with prepaid debit cards should still consider going for it.

For their sake, here are several ways to capture the value of Office Max gift cards without studying up on all the ins and outs of manufactured spend.

Give them as gifts

Ok, this one's a bit of a joke, but some people actually give Visa and MasterCard gift cards as gifts! If you can get $200 in credit with your loved ones for $196.60, that's still a win!

Prepay your bills

You might be accustomed to paying your cell phone bills each month with a Chase Ink card to earn 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent. Using a Visa or MasterCard gift card bought at Office Max during this promotion captures the same 5-Ultimate-Rewards-point earning opportunity, but includes a nice discount off face value. If you're the kind of guy who frets over taxes, you can probably even get away with deducting the entire amount of your cell phone payment (though as I'm fond of saying, not only am I not an accountant, I'm definitely not your accountant!).

In addition to cell phones, there are many telecommunications companies, among others, that happily accept prepayments made with debit cards online. Check yours.

Use Evolve Money

This is a more flexible version of the above. Evolve Money accepts prepaid debit cards for bill payments to many merchants that don't themselves accept debit cards directly. You can use prepaid debit cards to make payments to your mortgage, car loan, student loans, municipal utility companies and tax authorities, and thousands of other merchants. If you use a Visa or MasterCard debit card bought at Office Max during this promotion, you'll do so at a nice discount.

As I've reported extensively elsewhere, you can even use prepaid debit cards to fund your own or your children's education through one of the many 529 College Savings plans that accept contributions through Evolve Money (I use the Utah Educational Savings Plan because of its flexibility and low-cost Vanguard mutual funds). If you decide to go this route, please read my entire series on Evolve Money.

Buy gift credit at merchants where you'll use it

While a classic example is at a merchant like Amazon.com, where you can buy gift credit in almost any denomination and have it simply wait for you to redeem it against future purchases, there are other choices you might consider: if you frequently ride Uber, buy yourself some gift credit and it will be automatically used up as you take rides.

Conclusion

Offers like this Office Max deal are as close to free money as you're likely to find without a deep dive into the world of manufactured spend. You may think it's not worth lugging around gift cards for everyday purchases, but hopefully the examples above show you that's totally unnecessary: these cards are almost as easy to liquidate as they are to buy.

IHG Rewards Into the Chaos: Points or Nights?

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As you know, IHG Rewards' 4th quarter promotion is called Into the Nights, and gives you the option of earning up to 50,000 bonus points or 2 free nights at any IHG property, or a combination of points and nights.

As you may or may not know, depending on how many promotional thresholds you've met so far, the implementation of the promotion has been a fiasco, which has earned it the affectionate moniker "Into the Chaos." For months, stays weren't tracking or posting properly, and it was unclear how long it would take for IHG Rewards to resolve the situation.

I met the last of my promotional thresholds back on November 23, and recently noticed that my bonus points for each threshold finally posted on December 9:

I met my first threshold (booking through the IHG app) on November 2, and those points posted on November 17, which gives roughly the same delay (15-16 days).

You've earned them: Nights or Points?

The above points were automatically earned for meeting each threshold. Now I have to decide whether to select nights or points as my reward for meeting all 5 of my challenges:

I've been turning the problem over in my mind for a few days, because it has a number of angles worth considering.

  • First, IHG has their periodic PointsBreaks List, which allows you to book rooms at any of the properties on the list during the current PointsBreaks period (currently November 2014 to February 2015) for just 5,000 IHG Rewards points. These stays are extremely popular, and if you plan on using your IHG Rewards points for a PointsBreaks stay, you should obviously select points as your Into the Nights rewards: 25,000 points translates into a 5-night PointsBreaks stay!
  • Second, a mere look at IHG's hotel categories suggests that, on the contrary, free nights are the obvious choice. Just 3 of IHG's categories cost less than 25,000 points, so for stays at Category 4 and higher properties you'll want to redeem free nights, instead.
  • Ultimately, the right choice will depend on your actual travel plans. I have two trips planned in the first half of 2015, to Austin and New Orleans, and the downtown IHG properties where I would consider staying in those cities are all Category 4 or higher. I don't know whether I'll end up staying at IHG properties on those trips, but those are the most likely candidates and would require free night certificates, not points.

Conclusion

As my readers know, the least valuable reward is always the one you don't redeem. That goes double for IHG's Into the Nights free night certificates, which must be redeemed by December 31, 2015. If you can't commit to redeeming your free night certificates at properties Category 4 or higher in 2015, or you plan on redeeming points for PointsBreaks stays, you may well be best off selecting points. But if you have a general idea of your 2015 travel plans, check the cities you plan to visit and see if you won't be better off redeeming free night certificates, instead.

Cash back at Amazon.com

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First of all, check out my spiffy new disclosure policy which should now be found at the top of each blog post when you visit my website. It reads:

"Disclosure: to the best of my knowledge, I receive no third-party affiliate revenue for any of the content on this site. I do occasionally include my own personal referral links for products and services, many of which you can find on my Support the Site! page. I am also theoretically paid for clicks through the Google Adsense ad found in the righthand sidebar (theoretically since I haven't actually hit a payment threshold yet) and for purchases made through my Amazon Associates referral link."

I don't know if there's anything else anyone has any questions about, but obviously it's a work in progress so do let me know if there's any ambiguity or anything like that.

HawaiianMiles for shopping at Amazon.com

All the way back in the day, Hawaiian Airlines was the only shopping portal that awarded miles for shopping at Amazon.com through their HawaiianMiles shopping portal (the "online eMarket"). I earned a whole 982 HawaiianMiles which, I noticed while researching this post, expired back in July:

This is obviously fairly embarrassing, since I could have redeemed them for something exciting like a subscription to All You magazine.

After HawaiianMiles cut Amazon.com from their shopping portal, I pretty much gave up on cash back while shopping there, and focused other ways to maximize my purchases, like rotating credit card categories with Chase Freedom or Discover it, or the "bookstore" 5% bonus category with the US Bank Cash+ card.

It's worth using cashback portals to shop at Amazon.com

For some reason I was recently clicking around TopCashBack and discovered that the "limited" departments TopCashBack pays out on are actually the very categories I do most of my Amazon.com shopping in!

TopCashBack pays 8% cash back for purchases in the following departments:

  • Home & Kitchen;
  • Women's Fashion;
  • Men's Fashion;
  • Kid's & Baby Fashion.

That's an incredibly generous range, and includes virtually everything I buy from Amazon.com. If you're combining it with a card that pays 5% cash back (or gift cards purchases at a bonused merchant), you'll increase your savings even more.

Conclusion

My Amazon Associates referral link pays me much less than 8% for purchases made by my readers, so if you're shopping in one of the 8% cash back categories you have my blessing to collect portal cash back instead!

Quick hit: Orbitz $100 off $100+ promo is back (2 nights required)

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Via Miles To Memories, run, don't walk over to Orbitz.com and start booking pairs of nights for $100 off using promo code "VISACHECKOUT" and paying through, you guessed it, Visa Checkout.

Your total stay cost must exceed $100 before the discount is applied, your stay must be two or more nights, and not all properties are eligible. According to Miles To Memories, the code is good for travel between December 10 and June 30, 2015.

If you don't have an Orbitz Rewards account yet, feel free to sign up using my referral link. If you do, we'll each earn $25 in Orbucks. And don't forget to click through a shopping portal for additional cash back: TopCashBack is currently paying 7% on Orbitz reservations, although only 2% on reservations made with a coupon code.

Update: selling Marriott gift cards to Cardpool

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Last month I wrote about a nice opportunity to score Marriott stays on the cheap or make a quick buck buying Marriott gift cards for 25% off and then reselling them at 92% of their face value.

First the good news: as expected, Marriott gift card purchases of $200 or more made at Marriott properties (not their multitude of other brands) counted towards the American Express Sync offer, and I received $50 statement credits on all my cards within a day or two.

However, you may remember that my plan was to resell those gift cards, since I so rarely pay for hotel stays that it would take me years to spend $800 at Marriott properties. Consequently, last week I went to sell a single Marriott gift card to Cardpool, and immediately ran into a problem: when submitting a card's details, Cardpool requires a 15-digit gift card number. But the cards I bought have 20-digit gift card number, plus 4-digit PIN's! Fearing the worst, I wrote to Cardpool asking if they only purchased 15-digit gift cards, and whether there was a workaround.

There was. This afternoon, Cardpool wrote me back, explaining:

"Simple [sic] enter the 15 digits for the gift card number and input the remaining number + the PIN number as PIN number or CID."

So there you have it: if you're reselling a 20-digit Marriott gift card to Card Pool, enter the first 15 exposed digits as the card number, and the remaining digits plus the PIN in the second required field.

Oh, and if you're reselling to Cardpool, be sure to click through TopCashBack in order to earn an additional 4% of the card's face value in cash back.

Developing: problems with Walmart bill pay

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This is just a quick note going into the weekend for readers who haven't yet seen this on Twitter, Flyertalk, or another manufactured spending forum.

Some Walmart Money Center registers are no longer showing some credit card payment networks

As longtime readers know, I'm a huge fan of CheckFreePay bill payments at Walmart, which allow you to use PIN-enabled debit cards to pay Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and some American Express cards (depending on the card issuer). They make it easy to liquidate PIN-enabled prepaid debit cards and free up credit limits for additional spending throughout the month.

This afternoon I was unable to make bill payments to any of my credit cards, which I discovered has been emerging as a problem in various places around the country.

There have also been reports of people still being able to successfully make bill payments as late as this evening, so at this point this is a "your miles may vary" situation. But if you are planning to make Walmart or other CheckFreePay bill payments to your credit cards this weekend, don't be shocked if your cashiers are unable to find your payees in their system.

Stay tuned for updates in the coming days and weeks, as this situation is developing...

Considering the US Bank Flexperks Travel American Express

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[Update 12/9/14: Oops! I stopped into another US Bank branch today and studied the fine print of this offer. It turns out the American Express version of the card also bonuses charitable spending, it's just formatted slightly differently on the website and I missed it. The American Express card is different from the Visa Signature card in that it bonuses restaurant spend, in addition to the Visa Signature bonus categories. I apologize for the oversight.]

I frequently write about the US Bank Flexperks Travel Visa Signature, a card I hold and use aggressively to earn Flexpoints, worth up to 2 cents each on paid airfare redemptions and up to 1.5 cents each when redeemed for hotel stays.

Considering my travel needs, I like the Flexperks Travel Visa Signature for its low annual fee and lucrative bonus categories. The card costs $49 per year, against which you can redeem 3,500 Flexpoints. Additionally, you earn a 3,500 Flexpoint bonus each cardmember year you spend $24,000 or more. For that $49 fee, you'll earn 2 Flexpoints per dollar spend at either gas stations or grocery stores (or airlines), depending on which category you spend more in each statement cycle, plus 3 points per dollar spent with charitable organizations, including Kiva.

US Bank also issues a Flexperks Travel American Express

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I popped into a US Bank branch in my hometown to drop off some money orders and saw an advertisement for an American Express version of the Flexperks Travel card.

Judging strictly by the marketing materials, the principle difference between the American Express and Visa Signature versions of the card is that the American Express card, in addition to double points at gas stations, grocery stores, or airlines, also gives double points on restaurant purchases, but not on charitable spending.

That's a fairly small difference, given that I don't use my Flexperks Travel Visa Signature card for either restaurant or charitable spending anymore. Or it would be, except...

Visa and American Express code merchants differently in important ways

I ran some early experiments on this topic all the way back in 2013, finding that 7-Eleven store locations that did not sell gasoline were frequently coded as gas stations by Visa and MasterCard, but not American Express, while locations that did sell gas were coded as gas stations by all three.

There are other coding anomalies that make Visa and MasterCard credit cards generally preferable, strictly from the standpoint of manufactured spend, which subscribers can read more about in last week's newsletter.

American Express has its advantages, too

It may sound like I'm dumping on the American Express version of the card for being less lucrative than the Visa Signature version. On the contrary: actual grocery stores are coded as such by Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, and convenience stores that sell gas are likewise typically coded as gas stations by all three, so if that's where you do the bulk of your manufactured spending with the card, you may find either version suits you equally well.

Meanwhile, cards issued on the American Express network have their own unique advantages. They'll be eligible for any American Express offers that can be synced to Twitter (just set up each card in your Amex Sync Machine). And it's the season to remember that they'll be eligible for Small Business Saturday, as well, should that promotion return next year.

Flexpoint earning is throttled each calendar year

Every version of the Flexperks Travel Rewards credit card throttles earning each calendar year: after spending $120,000 during the calendar year, you'll earn just 1 Flexpoint for every $2 spent with your card.

That's just $10,000 per month, an amount easily exceeded if you have easy access to lucrative bonus category merchants, which may make you consider signing up for a second or third Flexperks Travel Rewards card. If you do, I don't think it's unreasonable to make one of those the American Express version of the product, in order to take advantage of the benefits mentioned above.

Conclusion

Just remember, whether you decide to sign up for one, two, or none of these cards, you should still freeze your IDA and ADS credit reports. It's not just a good idea: it's a great idea.

And incidentally, if you're interested in signing up for the Visa Signature version of the Flexperks Travel product, you can drop me a line and I'll be happy to pass along my personal referral information. It has the same signup bonus as the publicly available offer, but also offers me 5,000 Flexpoints, which is a nice touch.

Is pure Arrival+ mile arbitrage possible?

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I have a lot of bad ideas. I have a lot of good ideas, too! Basically, I have a lot of ideas. Being self-employed, I have a lot of time to sit and think (and, naturally, manufacture spend), all for the sake of my beloved readers.

Lying in bed late last night, I came up with what I believe may be my worst idea yet, although readers are of course free to chime in with their own candidates. Interested yet?

You can redeem Arrival+ miles against refunded purchases

Whenever I mention a creative way to maximize the value of Barclaycard Arrival+ miles, I always get pushback from readers who dismiss any actual travel redemption as a mug's game: after all (the logic goes), since you can redeem Arrival+ miles for as little as $25 against any travel purchase, even if that purchase is later refunded, no one should ever have a problem with "orphaned" Arrival+ miles.

I don't do this, for two reasons: first and foremost, I have plenty of authentic travel purchases (like this Monday's Orbitz deal) that Arrival+ miles are redeemable against, so I never have more than a few tens of thousands of Arrival+ miles in my account at one time anyway. But secondly, and this is where I meet a lot of resistance, since the Barclaycard Arrival+ card is one of the most lucrative cards for non-bonused spend I don't feel any compulsion to abuse that relationship by repeatedly making preposterously large purchases, redeeming miles against them, and then refunding them (it works in the opposite order, as well). That's easily tracked and easily flagged abuse, and it doesn't interest me.

Refunded purchases forfeit earned miles

When you make a purchase with your Arrival+ card, you earn 2 miles per dollar spent with the card. When you refund a purchase made with your Arrival+ card, you forfeit the same number of miles.

10% of miles redeemed for travel purchases are instantly redeposited

Whenever you redeem your Arrival+ miles against a travel purchase, 10% of the redeemed miles are instantly redeposited into your Arrival+ balance.

These miles are pure abstractions; they are not and could not be linked in any way to the "original" mile-earning purchase(s).

Consequently, while refunding a purchase causes the exact number of miles earned with that purchase to be "clawed back," any redeposited bonus miles remain in your account.

Rube Goldberg, eat your heart out

All of these facts were swirling around in my mind last night when I came up with the following. Consider the following stylized situation:

  • On January 1, the cardholder makes 10 prepaid, refundable airfare or hotel reservations, each for $1,250, for September 1.
  • On January 2, the cardholder makes 10 prepaid, refundable airfare or hotel reservations, each for $1,250, for September 2
  • On January 3, when the January 1 reservations post and the Arrival+ miles are deposited into the cardholder's account, she redeems the 2,500 Arrival+ miles earned with each purchase against each purchase.
  • The cardholder will receive $250 in statement credits and have 2,500 Arrival+ miles remaining in their account.
  • Also on January 3, the cardholder makes 10 prepaid, refundable airfare or hotel reservations, each for $1,250, for September 3.
  • On January 4, the cardholder makes 10 prepaid, refundable airfare or hotel reservations, each for $1,250, for September 4
  • Also on January 4, when the January 2 purchases clear and Arrival+ miles are deposited into the cardholder's account, she redeems 5,000 Arrival+ miles against one January 2 reservation and 2,500 Arrival+ miles earned with each purchase against the other nine January 2 reservations.
  • The cardholder will receive $275 in statement credits and have 2,750 Arrival+ miles remaining.
  • The cardholder can then cancel a September 1 reservation, refunding $1,250 to her account and forfeiting 2,500 Arrival+ miles, leaving a balance of 250 miles.
  • This continues forever.

It works, but only for a certain definition of "works"

As I said to begin with, this is certainly one of the worst ideas I've ever had. There are two key problems with it, which are already illustrated in the stylized example above:

  • It takes roughly 10 days to earn enough miles to cancel all ten reservations made on Day 1. Each day you'll earn enough bonus miles to forfeit one reservation's worth of earned miles;
  • It takes roughly 5 days to earn enough cash back to "pay" for each reservation. Remember that each day you're redeeming roughly $250 in cash back, while each reservation costs $1,250.

In other words, it's impossible to "catch up" to yourself: you'll eventually (around September 24, in the example above, by my back-of-the-envelope calculation) have outstanding reservations when the day of the reservation comes around, and have to cancel the reservation without a sufficient Arrival+ mile balance to cover the deficit.

Of course, this is all setting aside a much more profound problem: In order to avoid paying interest, you would have to pay off your Arrival+ card each month! Even though all your reservations would be eligible for redemption eventually, each statement would close with some outstanding reservations that would have to be paid off to avoid interest charges.

Conclusion

So what do you think? Where does this idea stand in the pantheon of my terrible ideas?