I’ve written often of ways to earn miles, points, or cash back by buying gift cards and reload cards. The best opportunities entail earning credit card category bonuses at drug stores, grocery stores, gas stations, and office supply stores. By earning 2 to 5 points per dollar, the rewards earned often greatly exceed fees incurred when buying these cards. However, you can profit even more if you find ways to buy reloads and gift cards fee free. Luckily there are a couple of current opportunities:
PayPower Prepaid Card
As Milenomics discovered earlier this month, PayPower cards are now fee free in at least some locations. The trick is to find a store that carries them and that is willing to let you pay with a credit card. You can use this store locator to find them, but you’ll have to do your own legwork to find out if you can pay with a credit card.
Note that if you do not want to register for a permanent card, you can instead call to setup a PIN on your temporary card.
Serve swipe reloads
The American Express Serve card is almost identical to the Bluebird card. It has mostly the same limits and the same bill pay functions, and both can be reloaded with Vanilla Reload cards. There are a few differences, though. One huge difference is that while Bluebird can be “swipe reloaded” at Walmart, Serve can be reloaded at CVS and some 7-11 locations (as of late 2013). I’ve verified in my local CVS stores that I can reload a Serve card up to $500 at a time for no fee. And, via two transactions its possible to load the card to its $1K per day limit.
Unfortunately, each person can only have one card: either Bluebird or Serve. Of course, if you have a Bluebird card you can continue to load Bluebird fee-free at Walmart using a debit card.
See also
- Serve or Bluebird?
- Bluebird takes flight and changes the game
- Best Category Bonuses
- Gift card PINs
- Pay bills online with debit and prepaid cards
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Any tips on coaching the cashier at CVS? They only sometimes seems able
to figure out how to process a swipe reload to Serve.
Yes, tell them that you want to reload a prepaid card. I think the register has a button or something for that.
I tried to reload my Serve card at CVS, but they said only cash. I guess I don’t understand how this works.
You may have been unlucky and found a cashier or store that requires cash
[…] but equal, with one minor difference… the Swipe Reload at CVS, which I first read about on Frequent Miler here, this allows you to reload $500 per transaction (max $1K per day) fee free let’s see what […]
Thanks for the tip on this card.
I was able to buy it in Denver at my local Safeway with an A/E credit card.
[…] Miles and points fee free […]
I search the Paypower website, which lists one of the Giant Eagle around my house has these cards in stock. I went there today, did not find anything ：（
@FM the ability to swipe with a CC is a loophole. The advertised feature is to load CASH to serve for free at CVS.
I don’t think it is a loophole, but I did leave that little fact out of my post to make it less obvious.
I’m quite sure it is a loophole. Only a matter of time till it’s plugged.
Not a loophole. A Serve rep even volunteered that I could load by credit card at CVS. CVS is not stupid — they know about Serve loads by CC, just like they know about the Vanilla reload game.
These bums charged the annual fee already, and I just bought the cards this morning!!
Went to try to load these to my BB and charge was not approved. Try another card, same problem. So, I called the number on the back of the card and it says my balance is $494.05. After waiting like 20 minutes to get an operator she tells me that I don’t have $500 on the card because the monthly fee of $5.95 was billed. I litterally had to go through an hour long conversation with her and her supervisor for them to agree to refund the $5.95. However, they disabled the card for this, and said they would have to mail me a check, and took all my information down to do so, even requiring SSN. Worse still, they said they would only do it as a one time courtesy for one of my cards I bought, they didn’t do it for the other!!! The supervisor even smugly went and said that I know guys like you are doing this for credit card miles, and this is not what this card is meant for, we’ve been more than fair in refunding one of the fees, but, we won’t be refunding any more, or something like that. I guess since they have my information for the first refunded card they can make sure of this.
Horrible card, big waste of time, I’m out $6, and had to load an oddball amount to my BB from the other card.
I’m going back to VRs
I mean they charged the monthly fee, not annual fee.
That sucks. I woud not have given them my SSN for $6 though.
Did you register it online or use a temporary PIN?
Sorry to hear your trouble goarmed…but you saved a lot of people some trouble. There’s no way I’m buying even though there’s a stack of’em down the road.
The trick here seems to be unload them as soon as you buy them. Call and set the PIN from the parking lot of the place you’re going to unload them.
If Serve can be swipe loaded with any CC up to $5k a month with no fees, why bother with vanilla reloads and their $4.95 fee with BB anymore? Can you transfer money directly to your bank account the same way BB lets you?
I’ll be keeping my two Bluebirds………VR cards from Charlie Victor Sierra are like nova cane…….just stick it in and wait for the pain to go away………..and then Freedom does their 5X on gas so that Circle K purchases of VR cards are down to a measly .158 cents…..Sometimes it’s good to pay for something…………….
This post is disappointing. I bet this loophole is closed by next month (as soon as everybody had time to cancel their BB).
The ability to swipe reload at CVS isn’t a loophole, its an advertised feature of the Serve card
Oh crap that didn’t post to the right place.
@Sameer, yes I’ve used one to load to BB at WM register with no trouble.
@vadim, you can’t do swipe reloads at CVS
Yes, you can do swipe reloads at CVS but only to Serve, not to Bluebird
That would be a negatory.
Has anyone tried loading them to BB ?? I will be trying to purchase with CC this evening and then try to load them onto BB, but just wanted to check if someone has had any luck with it so far..
Does anyone know if you get bonus cashback with wellsfargo card or amex blue cash one when doing swipe reloads at CVS?