If you’re like me and scrambling to buy Vanilla Reload cards at CVS prior to April 4th when they go cash-only, you’ve probably found the reload cards out of stock at your local CVS. Here’s an alternative: Bring your Vanilla Reloadable prepaid card to CVS and tell the cashier that you’d like to “reload a prepaid card”. You should be able to load up to $500 per transaction and pay with a credit card (for now). Amex Serve has no fee, but with other cards you’ll be charged $3.95 per transaction. Here are the cards that should work at CVS (I’ve only tested a few):
- Amex Serve
- MyVanilla
- NetSpend
- PayPal
- JH Preferred
- Momentum
Sorry but Bluebird cards do not work at CVS for swipe reloads.
This trick will only work until CVS goes cash-only on April 4.
No idea what I’m talking about? See this post, or don’t worry about it since the deal will be dead soon anyway.
Apologies to those who live in areas that are already cash-only.
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@FM. For those who have WM (assuming WM accepts visa/mc debit) nearby they can always make MO. No need on having any third party cards and dealing with shutdown. Am I missing something
I’m not sure what you mean about no need to have third party cards, but yes it is true that you can go to Walmart to buy money orders and pay with debit cards.
Another limiting factor is number of swipes. I can do two $5K transaction at CVS w/o getting any fraud alert, but I wouldn’t be comfortable doing more than 5 $503.95 transactions at CVS with the same card.
Amex Serve is supposed to cease 4/4 as well not sure about the others…
Yes they all go cash only 4/4. This is a very short term solution!