This post is going to be short and sweet (which is what most good financial advice should be). No one wants to pay more than they have to for anything. If you had a choice between $20 for some jeans versus $12 for the same jeans, I’m pretty sure most people would prefer to pay $12. The fact is, that choice is there for us. And it’s in the form of glorious gift cards.
Most people associate gift cards with things people gives us when they don’t know what gift to get. How about buying gift cards for yourself? And getting them at a pretty good discount? It’s all possible through gift card portals, the best of which is giftcardgranny.com. GCG is an aggregate site that lists all the gift cards available for almost any company from many different gift card purchasing websites. Depending on the company, you can easily find gift cards from 5-20% off. For example, a recent search for Starbucks gift cards shows that there are $75 gift cards which are selling for $63.30. That’s a 15% discount! For people who frequent Starbucks, you’re not going to find savings like that anywhere else. Don’t like to spend that much at Starbucks? There are $10 gift cards selling for $8.45, about 15% off once again. Hate Starbucks? Dunkin Donuts has a decent selection of gift cards also.
There are many, many locations that have gift cards for sale. Dining places usually have better discounts (like Starbucks in the previous example), but there are usually some pretty good discounts for other places like Home Depot and Target. It is unfortunately hard finding grocery store gift cards, so you’ll have to stick with any number of awesome cash back cards for groceries. It’s also important to not go crazy buying gift cards. It’s easy to see all those discounts and start buying up stuff like crazy. The solution? Only get gift cards for those places you go to all the time. Check your credit card statements from the last few months and note the places you go to more often than not. Then get a gift card with a good discount to those places and voila! You just saved a good amount of money by not doing much work at all.
Gift cards don’t usually provide return or purchase protection on products like most credit cards do. So any big purchases should probably still be made with cash or a credit card. But for little things you buy here and there that can add up, getting some gift cards can be very helpful. Just remember to use them and make sure they don’t end up in the bottom of some drawer like most gift cards do.
This is an awesome point. If you can take some time to prepare your purchases (as you should), you can always use store gift cards for serious savings. Thanks for this reminder! And if you combine these with a credit card bonus, you’re gonna be doing well. 🙂
Thanks for the comment Sam. Yeah exactly credit card bonuses make the world go round! Well, our worlds anyway.