The day after Christmas you’re likely to have a few merchant gift cards lying around. If you’ve been following my posts about Gift Card Churning, you might have more than a few.
The best way to get full value from these cards is to use them for things you would have bought anyway. Or, treat yourself or others to something special. However, if you can’t find a good use for them and you’d really prefer cash, that’s when it’s time to look at options for selling them.
I’ve written before about a site called GiftCardGranny that lists online options for selling gift cards and shows in a nice chart how much money you’ll get with each option. Well, this Monday (Dec 26th) they are running a special promotion called Gift Card Exchange Day in which gift card resellers will have better offers just on this one day. I’ve been told to expect most cards to sell for 2 to 3 percentage points more than usual, but some offers will be even better.
To get an idea of why this is important, consider Sears gift cards that some of us bought on December 9th in exchange for 11.77 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar. According to the current rate chart on GiftCardGranny, we can sell those cards today for 84 cents on the dollar. In other words, not counting the points earned, we would lose 16 cents for each dollar spent. This would mean that we would be essentially buying Ultimate Rewards points for 16/11.77 = 1.36 cents each. That’s not a bad price as it is close to the fair trading price of 1.31 cents, but it’s not great. Now suppose the offer on Sears gift cards goes up to 87 cents on the dollar (this is just a guess – we’ll have to wait until Monday to see). In that case, by selling our gift cards we would be essentially buying Ultimate Rewards points for 13/11.77 = 1.1 cents each, which is an excellent price!
The Gift Card Exchange Day website to checkout on Monday is: http://www.giftcardexchangeday.com/
I’ll send out a reminder on Monday along with whatever interesting prices I’ve found.
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