Do you ever pay with gift cards? There are quite a few sites out there that will pay you in gift cards for small tasks and surveys and such. Some people sell the gift cards for cash or trade them for other gift cards. Personally, if I had started sooner, I'd have used as many gift cards as possible to pay for Christmas shopping. To me, it's just like money as long as it's a shop I do business with anyway, and there are no usage fees, and it doesn't expire (at least not anytime soon, but in my opinion they shouldn't expire at all, especially not the ones that are purchased with cash).
I like to use up gift cards as soon as I get them because you never know how much is on them and some do expire. I know some companies have gone into liquidation and they refuse to take gift cards when they announce it. It happened in the UK with HMV records and they refused to honor gift cards for the last month of sales. You never know if a company will go under, so use them as fast as possible I say. I have some Amazon gift certificates and they also have an expiry date and limit which Amazon you can use too. Hard cash is best.
I haven't done that yet, but right now the only gift card that I would like to acquire would be Amazon gift cards, because they don't accept Paypal, and I want to buy some things from them.
I am surprised your gift credit expires. I have a few hundred in gift credit at Amazon and there is no expiration. I also read somewhere that Americans have not used over 40 billion dollars in potential gift card credit since 2009. That is a ridiculous number. I will try and find the article. I have a few hundred as I said but I know it won't expire so I let it sit until there is something I need. If it had an expiration I can't imagine why anyone would not just make a simple purchase. Might as well throw money down the toilet. Over 40 billions dollars. :/ Ok my fault since 2008. "Millions of Americans aren’t playing their cards right. In fact, we’ve left more than $44 billion on the table, in the form of unused gift cards, according to a new study. “People are letting cash slip away that they could be using,” says John Kiernan, a senior analyst with CardHub. Kiernan, citing CardHub numbers, estimates that some $44 billion in unredeemed gift-card value has been accumulating since 2008."
Using gift cards is my secret to never having paid a dime out of pocket for my purchases on Amazon. I have made so many orders through Amazon and all of them have been paid for by the gift cards I have received. If a site I am working on doesn't offer paypal or payza payment and they do offer Amazon GCs then I will almost always go with the gift card. Plus Amazon gift cards never expire, so that's a win as far as I'm concerned.
I don't typically use gift cards, but I found a few examples where it's possible to gain some advantages by doing so. Some places will offer a promotional price for gift cards, like getting a bonus 10% credit, or something similar. You can combo this with a credit card that gives cash back on purchases made with it... altogether you could potentially stand to save quite a bit by leveraging these bonuses.
I try to use gift cards when I can because I want to save money for things I can't get easily with the gift cards. However, it seems more difficult to earn gift cards but they do save money because I earn them at places that don't reward with cash.
