- I love gift cards. I love giving them and receiving them.
So if you plan on buying multiple gift cards for a ton
of people as a gift, it can get a little expensive.
However, if you are planning on doing that,
you can purchase gift cards at a discount
if you buy them in bulk.
(logo humming)
Hey guys, it's Justine with The College Investor:
Investing & Personal Finance for Millennials.
And one of the tricks that I've found on saving money
with gift cards is buying them
through discount online retailers.
So discount gift cards work by people selling
unwanted gift cards to online retailers.
And a lot of times what these retailers are doing
is they are selling them at a discount.
So high demand gift cards are typically
going out of stock really quickly.
Whereas if you are getting gift cards
with the least amount of demand,
you're gonna see them at a really steep discount.
But oftentimes when you are using
these discount gift card sites,
most times you are going to receive those gift cards
in the form of an email or an electronic gift card.
So you're not actually going to see a physical gift card
in the mail, unless there is an option to do that otherwise.
So you're gonna have to get creative
with how you present these gift cards
if you are doing these as a gift.
So of course, we scoured the internet to figure out
exactly where you can buy these discount gift cards.
And I'm going to start with my favorite one that we found,
which is with raise.com.
Okay, so right off the bat, what I really like
about raise.com is if you have a Rakuten account,
you can also get 1% cash back on your purchase
through this website.
What I also like about how this is really organized
is you can search for gift cards by discount, by cash back,
or, like I was mentioning,
if you really wanted a physical card to give somebody,
you could actually sort that by physical,
physical card type,
and then it's going to show you exactly what gift cards
are available as a physical card.
And what I also love about this is you can see
exactly how much of a discount that you'd be receiving
through each of these retailers.
So Cracker Barrel has up to 15% off their gift cards.
So if you find something that you like,
you can just click on that retailer
and then see exactly what's available.
So you can see, you could get a $50 gift card
at the price of $42.50, which is 15% off,
or $25 gift card for $22.50, which is a great deal.
So you can easily organize your gift card search
through physical or electronic, or by cash back
or the percentage discount.
Another one you'll wanna check out is cardcash.com.
So they offer a 45-day guarantee on all of their cards.
So if something were to happen and you weren't able to use
that gift card for whatever reason,
they do offer a 45-day guarantee.
And also they have a Facebook group
where you can get access to be the first to know
what kind of gift cards are being offered at a discount.
So let's head over to their website and I'll show you
how it works.
Okay, so this is the CardCash homepage,
and you can quickly see there are big retailers
like Starbucks, Walgreens, Michael's
all listed right off the bat and you can see exactly
how much of a discount that you would be receiving.
It looks like the ones in orange are probably
going to give you the steepest discount.
So you can simply highlight a gift card
that you're looking for,
and they'll give you the option of figuring out
which gift cards you want to use.
And so they actually have quite a few 250 eGift cards
are available at $50 and you can get a 1% discount
if you were to bulk order Old Navy gift cards.
Your third option is to go through cardpool.com.
They also offer a guarantee, theirs is 60 days.
However, I did find on their website
that some of the retailers that they were listing
and advertising as that they have gift cards available,
actually weren't available.
So I feel like their stock was a little bit lower.
If we go over to their website,
you'll see exactly what kind of gift cards
they have available and then which ones are in stock.
But when I was on this website earlier this month,
as I was clicking around, some of the gift cards
that they were highlighting
actually weren't available at all.
So you may have to just do some digging around with Cardpool
just to make sure these gift cards are actually available.
So Applebee's, you can buy a $25 Applebee gift card for $20,
which I think is a great deal.
You get $5 off, and then you can see exactly how
those gift cards are going to be delivered to you,
which is digitally through your email.
Your last option is to go through giftcards.com.
What I liked about this website is that it also offered
a 1% Rakuten cash back.
And you also have the option of doing multi-store gift cards
or corporate gift cards, which I didn't see
in the other three options that I mentioned to you.
What's also interesting about giftcards.com
is as I was scrolling through their different options,
I didn't see them listed right away as at a discount.
However, they do have a rewards program
called G-money points,
so every time that you purchase a gift card
through giftcards.com,
every dollar earns you a hundred points,
and then you can redeem those points for more gift cards.
So that's another way that you could use these
at a discount.
So, for example, with a Home Depot gift card,
you actually are just purchasing full price,
$25 Home Depot gift card,
but you'll be using those reward points to use in the future
at a discounted price.
I did see when I went over to this More tab
that you could buy discount gift cards,
but when I went to this tab,
it really didn't look like there was a whole bunch
of available options.
And another thing when I was researching
giftcards.com earlier, it did look like they were
in a partnership with Cardpool,
so that's another thing to consider
if you were planning on using giftcards.com.
Overall, my favorite pick is raise.com.
I just found their interface really easy to use.
I liked the filtering system and there were a ton of options
to buy gift cards at a discount,
and it was clearly marked exactly how much of a discount
you'd be receiving for each of those options.
And I didn't feel like I was limited
to only a certain number of retailers.
There were literally dozens and dozens
that I could choose from
and feel like I was getting a really great deal.
So if you are planning on buying gift cards as a gift,
especially multiple gift cards,
I highly recommend using a site like raise.com
to get the most bang for your buck.
If you are interested in being
a financially-savvy gift giver,
among other things financially related,
be sure to check out all of our free resources
at thecollegeinvestor.com.