This quarter for the Chase Freedom the categories are not great for gift card churning.
If you were to go to a chain restaurant or movie theater and purchase their gift cards to resell, you will likely lose more money than it is worth to buy the points directly from Chase.
Lowe’s, the home improvement company, is the only company in this quarter that would be worthy of churning gift cards. I ran through a few scenarios for Lowe’s and it is not good.
According to GiftCardGranny.com, Lowe’s is worth about 85% of the face value. If we used the route of Chase Freedom + Shop Discover’s portal for 5% cash back, it would boost Lowe’s to be worth 90% face value. In essence, it would be buying the points at $10 per 500 Ultimate Reward points (not factoring in the Chase Exclusives) which comes down to $.02/point. Not good at all. You could lower it if you do Ultimate Rewards Mall for an extra 5x. This changes the math slightly, it would be buying the points at $15 per 1000 Ultimate Reward points, for $.015/point. I purchased a $25 gift card from Lowe’s using the Freedom + UR Mall. The points from the mall has already posted to my account. I am waiting for the statement to close to see if ordering from their website would work. According to various reports online about Kohl’s, I’d expect Lowe’s to work the same way. I will post a follow up as soon as I find out.
If you need to top off your UR account and not buy through Chase this would be a better way since you’ll save a $.01/point.
I visited a Lowe’s store and they also stocked Shell, Gulf, and Hess gas cards. Of the three, Shell has the highest value and the math looks like this: $11 for 500 points which would be $.022/point also not good.
