BigHabitat
Level 2 Member
Ok, it’s a bit of a crazy day today, a fair number of things to consider. Here’s my laundry list of things that I will be doing to drum up some points, miles, or cash
- Buy Staples gift cards online to get $10 off each. This is a nice daily deal. $200 gift cards for $196.25? Yes please, I’ll take the max allowed (3).
- Buy some Dell 2015HV monitors at Staples for $79.99 each. Sell on Amazon for over $100. I’m going to use some Staples gift cards that I redeemed Discover cash for, go through a portal, and use a coupon to make it even better.
- Reload Sears gift cards through the Alaska Airlines portal to earn 8x miles. While Discover Deals had been the go-to portal previously with 10% cashback, I’ll take Alaska Airlines miles at 8x now as opposed to 5% cash now and 5% cash later. But I won’t go crazy since Sears deals have been scarce.
- I’m going to use a targeted ebay 4x coupon to buy gift cards. This is effectively another 8% discount for whatever cards I get, and/or if i can find some from Paypal digital gifts and if I haven’t exceeded their hidden volume limits I can get 5x Ulimate Rewards points.
- I’m going to use up a $100 dell epromo code to buy something at Dell. I was looking at some of the monitor deals with gift cards, either the P2314H ($199 with $75 gc, $218.80 on Amazon) or the U2414h ($289.99 with $100 gc, $274.99 on Amazon) or a Vizio E32h-C1 ($229.99 with $75 gc, $239.99 on Amazon). Keep in mind there is an unpublished annual or lifetime limit on epromo codes (10?) and don’t like resellers, even though they incessently cycle these epromo deals.
- I tried to buy some more free after points crap from Kmart, but it looks like I was a little late. Sorry, no new prizes for the Craptastic giveaway. So this one doesn’t count.
- I’m considering buying a few of this Foscam camera on sale for $59.99 at Home Depot (per slickdeals.com, use coupon RWBEVENTHD for $5 off one). It goes for $79.99 at Amazon and is #44 in Camera and Photo. I’m a bit wary since I’ve heard Foscam is another company like Netgear which tries to go after resellers, but Amazon still lets you list these as new. The play would be to use Home Depot gift cards from an office supply store for 5x, or a supermarket for 5% + fuel points, then go through a portal to get another 4x (AA portal) or 5% (Discover). Even better would be to get an online coupon.
- I’m going to redeem some Kohl’s cash that I got last week from buying some discounted toys. I haven’t ordered Kohl’s in a while so I can’t remember if it will earn a portal bonus like the 6x from Rapid Rewards Shopping. I doubt it, but since its use it or lose it I’m going to try.
Many of these are not the actual “deal” of buying a specific item for resale, but positioning transactions (to borrow a frequent flyer concept) to prepare and juice up the deals when they do come around. By stocking up on gift cards at 8x, if there is a deal later on when Sears doesn’t have a good portal bonus but a better cash profit I can still be assured of getting a good overall return.
You might have noticed in point 2 about redeeming Discover Cash for Staples gift cards. Now some people may prefer to just take cash since its obviously the most liquid reward and is a real currency that can be used to pay bills and stuff. However, a $25 Staples gift card for $20 forgone cash back is a deal for me. Why? Because if someone were offering me Staples gift cards at 20% off I would be a buyer, in fact my recent purchases have been at 10% off, 13.33% off, etc. So it would be silly for me to get cash and then buy at a lessor discount. The only hassle with the $25 cards is that gift cards are limited to 5 per order, but easy enough to work around by buying smaller items.
Burn those expiring rewards certificates and “quasi-cash”
Another point – it is critical to burn up expiring rewards like Dell epromo certificates, Kohls cash, Sears Shop Your Way points, Staples rewards, etc. You wait too long, its worth $0. So if you have these, try to use them up asap. This is usually about minimizing a potential loss, not maximizing a profit. Now if you have a couple months and you know you won’t forget about it, fine. But if you have 2 weeks (like Kohls cash) you should definitely try to convert that to a purchase, which you can then resell.
And if you use Staples rewards – the earlier the better. This is because if you have a return, the credit goes back to the original reward, and if that reward is expired, you are SOL.
Continue reading...