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Office Max catches on to the churners!

April 2, 2013 By pfdigest

THOSE POINTS JUST GOT A LITTLE HARDER TO CHASE: Chasing The Points just revealed what has apparently been a nice little bit of manufactured spending for those in the know. Quoth CTP:

Another mistake I made was making too many orders too frequently, Office Max’s systems registered this, and did not fulfill. When I called Office Max to rectify the situation, I wound up speaking to someone on their credit analysis team. She explained to me that there is now a limit of 5 SKUs per customer and explicitly told me that there are people buying thousands of dollars worth of gift cards and using their American Express card because of some sort of special. Before releasing my order, she went through all of my orders and asked me if the gift cards were for personal use. My plans, of course, were to resell the cards.

“Some sort of special”, indeed! The Amex OPEN Savings program lets you get savings at various companies with your Amex business card. One of those merchants is Office Max, and you can get 10% off on orders over $250.

So if you can buy something, get the 10% discount plus the points from the credit card purchase and then resell it… you just might have yourself a nice little side business. But what to resell? CTP seems to have figured it out:

Today, I checked Office Max and it seems they pulled the two of the three gift cards that I was buying from them: Home Depot and Nordstrom.

Let’s check GiftCardGranny.com and see how much you can sell those cards for:

So Cardpool is willing to pay you 95.5 cents on the dollar for something you could (until now) get for 90 cents on the dollar, plus credit card rewards. We’re guessing a nice chunk of been change has been transferred from OfficeMax into the hands of savvy credit card users. The OfficeMax OPEN Savings discount has been around for a while, so it’s surprising that this churn has lasted for this long.

AMEX GIFT CARDS, ANYONE?: On a completely unrelated note, you can get free shopping on American Express® Gift Cards through May 1 with the code ADMIN2013. (H/T: Hustler Money Blog)

Here’s how much your taxes will increase in 2013 (Happy New Year!)

January 3, 2013 By pfdigest

DON’T LOOK SO SURPRISED: If you’re like us, you got bored as hell reading about the fiscal cliff negotiations and lost interest pretty quickly. Fortunately, Dough Roller has summarized the results for us. (SPOILER ALERT: your taxes are going up.) His conclusion:

I’ve been a member of the middle class all of my life. I was in the lower middle class as a child, the middle class as a young adult, and in the upper middle class today. And if there’s one thing I know it’s this–whether by increased taxes, decreased spending, or both, folks in the middle class will be the ones that pay for our profligate spending.
I don’t care if you worship the current administration or loathe it. Republican or Democrat. In favor of tax increases or not. The wealthy, however defined, cannot save us from $16 trillion in debt, $1 trillion in annual deficits, and entitlement programs heading for a real fiscal cliff.
Middle class, gird yourself. As surely as night follows day, we will sacrifice more than anybody to pull us out of our fiscal mess.

FREE $2 MP3 CREDIT FROM AMAZON: Go here. Answer their question and share on Facebook. Enjoy! (H/T: SD)

FREQUENT MILER, AS ALWAYS, IS ON TOP OF THE SITUATION: One technique you can use to reduce your expenses and/or increase your credit card rewards is the double dip. The two steps of the double dip:

Using an online rewards portal, buy a gift card for your desired merchant.
Use the portal again and make your purchase with the gift card.

It’s pretty simple in concept, but where it gets complicated is in the varying policies on awarding points for gift card transactions. Sometimes you’ll get points for step 1, sometimes for step 2, sometimes for both, and sometimes for neither. Or else the terms & conditions will say that no points are awarded for step 1, but they are for step 2, except the opposite will happen. And so forth and so on.

Fortunately for us, Frequent Miler is on the scene with a listing of who’s likely to give you what. If this sort of thing appeals to you, then his article is definitely worth a read. He also covered how to find the best online shopping rewards portals a while back as well.

ANOTHER APP-O-RAMA: Another credit card churn data point, this one from Point Me To The Plane. The results: 8 new credit cards and a potential 350,000 points. Not a bad haul! PMTTP also tracked his credit scores. Transunion dropped by 8 points and Experian dropped by two. Fears of credit card apps hurting your credit rating tend to be overblown. Unless you’re getting ready for a mortgage, there isn’t much to worry about.

DO MORE BY TRYING TO DO LESS: According to Slate, the best way to approach your new year resolutions is to aim low:

If you were to ask Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir or Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan for a better New Year’s strategy, they’d likely suggest that the best resolution you can make is to do fewer things in 2013. The researchers argue that when busy people get busier, it leads to ignored deadlines, a cluttered desk, and a vicious cycle of falling further and further behind. Amid the disorder, a lot of bad decisions get made, and the best means of escape from this cycle may be a moratorium on new obligations.

Shafir and Mullainathan are leaders in the field of behavioral economics, which aims to apply insights from psychology to the study of economic decision-making. In their recent work, summarized in the forthcoming book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, they use behavioral economics to explain why conditions of scarcity—whether of time or money—often lead people to make bad decisions.

Makes sense, although we’re always suspicious of people who tell us exactly what we want to hear.

DEAL ALERT: Best Buy is feeling generous!

December 16, 2012 By pfdigest

A WHIFF OF DESPERATION FROM BEST BUY HQ: Best Buy is now offering a $10 gift card when you buy a $50 gift card. This is only available online, it’s one $10/$50 per transaction, and the offer expires December 18. It is a very good deal, as evidenced by the degree to which it has blown up on Slickdeals, and if it is not obvious to you why this is a good deal, please let us explain why:

Repeatability. “Rinse and repeat” is in effect here, as there does not seem to be a limit on the number of times you can do the deal.
Fungibility. Some stores let you use gift cards to buy other gift cards, and Best Buy is one such store. Two gift cards to look for at best buy are Kindle gift cards, which can be used at Amazon, and Visa gift cards. Last time I checked–which was, admittedly, a year ago–Best Buy carried Visa gift cards and you could buy them with a BB gift card. The Visa GCs had a $200 max and a $6 activation fee. If that option is still available, you could do the deal three times, pay $150 out of pocket, and get $174 on your Visa GC. In other words, it’s cash (equivalent) for 14% off.
Amex. If you sync your Amazon card on Twitter you can get $20 off a $200 purchase. So if you do the deal four times, then combine your gift cards into one transaction before Dec 31, you can get $260 worth of merchandise from Best Buy for $200. You can do this once per Amex card that you have.

Gift Cards for Fun and Profit

November 28, 2012 By pfdigest

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GIFT CARDS (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK): As everybody knows, gift cards have become very popular in recent years, so much so that there’s a mini-industry in place to handle the gift card abundance. It’s ridiculous that we can write almost one thousand words about gift card management as it relates to personal finance, but such is the world we live in. Odds are you have one or more of the things stashed around your house. Practitioners of personal finance ought to ask themselves: what can I do with the gift cards I already have, and is there any way for me to use them for my own financial benefit?

The answer to the second question is an emphatic YES… but we’ll get to that in a moment. For those gift cards you already have, there are several sites that let you sell gift cards you don’t want. Selling prices are often in the range of .60-80 cents on the dollar, so you take a hit, but if it’s a gift card you weren’t going to use, or if you were going to be induced to spend more money by your use of the gift card, then it’s a good choice. (Incidentally, if you don’t want to sell but don’t want to forget about the cards either, you can enter them on AwardWallet, a site which you should already be using anyway to track your various loyalty program balances.)

Which site should you sell to? If you’re looking to get the best price, Gift Card Granny compares what the various sites are offering for a given retailer’s gift card. Be warned that given the amount of fraud they have to deal with, gift card resellers can sometimes be a little tough to deal with, though. I can’t recommend any particular sites, but Frequent Miler and his readers made some recommendations, so take a look if you’re curious.

There’s another option for California residents: California law requires retailers to cash out gift cards with balances less than $10. If you have a balance greater than $10 that you’d like cashed out, see if you can split your gift card into multiple small-balance cards.

Yet another option is to use gift cards to buy other gift cards. A lot of stores don’t allow this, but some do–Sears in particular is known for this. A lot of places won’t let you do this, but it never hurts to ask.

And now the important question: how can you use gift cards for your own financial benefit? One obvious way is that if you know you have a big purchase coming up at a major retailer, you can also buy discounted gift cards to ease the sting. Buying gift cards over the internet is a transaction with high fraud potential, but you’re protected both by the credit card used to purchase and by the websites themselves. If you still don’t want to mess with gift cards on the interwebs, another option is to use, for example, a card which earns 5% supermarkets (or gas stations, or office supply stores, or whatever category you have available to you) to purchase gift cards there that you’re going to use elsewhere.

If you were particularly evil, you could exploit the California law for your own benefit by purchasing gift cards with rewards credit cards, then cashing them out. The problem with this is that it would be time-consuming and the returns would be low. If you tried to scale up the volume, stores might suspect you of criminal activity and refuse to cash you out.

And finally, there’s gift card arbitrage: buying low and selling high. The recent Staples gift card promotion is an example of this. It’s also been possible in the past to use various combinations of store discounts and credit card rewards to buy decent volumes of gift cards at a pretty good discount, then sell them to one of the online gift card resellers for a profit. Sometimes the buy-one-gift-card-with-another trick can be used for this purpose. These opportunities tend to be rare and unpublicized, so keep your eyes open–you won’t see anything unless you’re looking for it.

And since you read this thing all the way to the end, here is a real live actual gift card arbitrage opportunity I just noticed today. It’s somewhat laborious, so probably not worth your time, and if it were worth enough people’s time, the market would get flooded and prices would fall. Anyway: Maximizing Money pointed out that thanks to Coinstar you can exchange $40 worth of coins for $50 worth of gift cards from Dell, Old Navy or iTunes. In other words, you’re paying 80% of face value. If we look on Gift Card Granny, we see that Dell gift cards are selling as high as 84% as of this writing. So if you’re willing to feed $800 worth of coins into a machine, and prices don’t fall, you could possibly make yourself $40. Rinse and repeat. Worth it? Not for me, probably not for you, but maybe for somebody… Especially if you could figure out how to reduce the cost of $40 of coins. Happy carding!

Office Max catches on to the churners!

Here’s how much your taxes will increase in 2013 (Happy New Year!)

DEAL ALERT: Best Buy is feeling generous!

Gift Cards for Fun and Profit

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