Last week, a reader who goes by Stealph on FlyerTalk (and Bringer on MilePoint) alerted me to a new discovery. He had found $500 Visa cards for sale at Office Depot, each with only a $4.95 fee. Later in the week, reader Steve K reported the same finding in the comments of my post titled “The best way to Ink Money (revised).”
Why is this an amazing discovery? Office Depot is an office supply store. So, if you use a Chase Ink credit card which gives 5X for office supplies, you will get 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar when buying these gift cards. Since the fee is only 1%, this means that you can buy these Visa cards and use them for day to day spend and earn the equivalent of over 4X on all of your purchases!
Let’s look at how this compares to previously reported options:
Analysis Table
The table shown here estimates the “X” for each option and each point value. For example, If you buy gift cards at Staples via the Ultimate Rewards Mall (for 2X) and you value points at 1.31 cents each, this table shows that buying $100 Visa gift cards online will give you the equivalent of 2.87X (points per dollar) for spend that you make with that Visa gift card. In other words, while you start with 7 points per dollar in that scenario, just over 4 points per dollar are used to “pay you back” for the card’s $5.95 fee so you are left with 2.87X overall.
|
|
Gift Card Value |
Fee |
Points Earned |
Value points 1 cent |
Value points 1.31 cents |
Value points 2 cents |
|
Buy online through UR Mall 2X |
$100 |
$5.95 |
742 |
1.47X |
2.87X |
4.44X |
|
Buy online through UR Mall 3X |
$100 |
$5.95 |
848 |
2.53X |
3.93X |
5.50X |
|
Buy in-store Staples / OfficeMax |
$200 |
$6.95 |
1035 |
1.70X |
2.52X |
3.44X |
|
Buy at Office Depot |
$500 |
$4.95 |
2525 |
4.06X |
4.29X |
4.55X |
An amazing deal
In the table shown above, you can see that buying $500 gift cards at Office Depot is almost always the best option. You can then use those gift cards for purchases that would ordinarily only give you 1 point per dollar. Imagine if, over the course of a year, you put $12K of spend on Visa gift cards that were bought with a Chase Ink credit card. That’s just $1000 per month. In that case, you would earn 60,600 Ultimate Rewards points by buying and using gift cards, instead of the 12,000 points you would normally earn (within 1X categories). The extra cost to you over the year would be $4.95 * 24 = $118.80. That’s a very small price to pay for almost 50,000 extra points!
Be cautious
Yesterday I wrote “Why Chase cancels accounts (and how to protect yourself).” The key take away is that schemes like this should be done in moderation. If you max out your credit card each month by buying Visa gift cards, Chase will eventually catch on and shut down all of your accounts. No one knows exactly how much is too much so err on the side of caution. See the Dos and Don’ts in yesterday’s post.
If you do not have a Chase Ink card, you can read more about those and other cards on the Preparing for Miles page which can be found as a menu item at the top of every page on the Frequent Miler blog.
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[…] by an earlier post in which I explained how to buy $500 Visa gift cards at Office Depot (see “Almost too good to be true“). And, then both of those tricks were soon made irrelevant by my popular post […]
[…] some, the excitement began last April when I published “Almost too good to be true“. In that post, I showed how it was possible to earn 5 points per dollar when buying […]
robertw: No. The best use of those cards is to spend them like regular credit cards. To load bluebird you need either a Vanilla Reload card (which is different from a Vanilla Visa card) or a true debit card (with PIN) (not Amex) that can be used at the register at Walmart.
My OD is selling the AMEX cards. If I load that with $500 can it be loaded to Bluebird?
Bjp: At the time I wrote this post, the MyVanilla card was not yet available. I’ve since written a bit about it: https://frequentmiler.com/2012/09/21/myvanilla-finally-appears/
Just looked at their web site… I bought the ” my vanilla” . Which is loadable and other Percs like a bluebird card.
worth checking out.
The ” one vanilla ” is different. Simple debit card.
Nice idea. But need clarification please.
Don’t have an Ink card yet but needed to fill a min. Spend. On chase SW card.
Bought the $500 vanilla visa debit at CVS $3.95 fee.
To activate your required to complete a detailed new account sign up.
No business, “Personal use only” in the user agreement.
To reload , it seems to only take vanilla reloads.
Is that the only way to load this visa or can you buy another visa.? Or would that create a need for a new account sign up?
Thanks,
[…] 5 points per dollar everywhere. The excitement began, to some extent, with the discovery of $500 prepaid Visa cards at Office Depot. But then I stumbled upon Vanilla Reload cards at Office Depot. At first I teased […]
That is an amazing way to earn over 50,000 plus extra points! I don’t spend quite that much but it still all adds up.
[…] earn 5X Ultimate Rewards Points with a Chase Ink card (see “Almost too good to be true”) at Office […]
[…] write a lot about Vanilla. In the post “Almost too good to be true” I wrote about the Vanilla Prepaid Visa card. The trick was to use a Chase Ink credit card […]
John: Readers have reported that Office Depot will not allow you to buy Visa products with Office Depot gift cards.
Can you buy a $500 Visa gift card with Office Depot gift cards?
Paramus NJ OD has VanillaVisa $500s.
[…] deal! Make sure you check it out here and see if you can turn this into your advantage – link (I do not currently receive commission for the INK Bold card, so if you would like to sign up for […]