Until 3-21-15 Staples is offering a $20 rebate in the form of a Visa gift card when you buy $250 or more of Visa gift cards. The purchase fee for a $200 gift card is $6.95. If you buy 2 $200 gift cards you will have a profit of $6.10. That doesn’t sound like much but when you combine it with the credit card rewards you can get for purchasing the cards it is a good deal. I know at least one of my readers has a Chase Ink card that pays 5x at Staples which would mean they would get 2000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points in addition to the $6.10. I only have a 2% cash back card so my profit will be $14.10. That is a pretty good deal for just a few minutes of my time to buy the cards and submit the rebate. In addition to making a little money this is also helpful if you need to meet a minimum spend requirement to get a credit card bonus. There is a limit of one rebate per household for this deal.
Next week, 3-22-15 to 3-28-15, Staples is offering a $20 rebate in the form of a Staples gift card when you buy $250 or more of Mastercard gift cards. The math for this deal works the same. The big difference in this deal is that the rebate is for a Staples gift card which can only be used at Staples rather than for a Visa gift card which can be used anywhere that accepts Visa. This isn’t a big deal to me since I buy stuff at Staples on a regular basis. I’m in Staples at least once a month to get free stuff from recycling ink and they frequently have free after rebate items so using the Staples gift card will not be a problem.
Thanks for the tip, Andy. I didn’t make it in time for the VISA promotion, but I bought the $300 in Mastercard gift cards today. Since I don’t like the risk of carrying around $300 worth of gift cards, I immediately used the funds to load my Amazon gift card balance. Easy peasy. I paid $5.95 for the $100 card and $6.95 for the $200 card, so $12.90 total. That means a $7.10 profit in the form of a Staples gift card and $15 and change in credit card rewards. Plus it helps me meet the $5,000 threshold for the new credit card app bonus.
Basically I made $22.10 for 10 minutes of work. Thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome. I’m glad you were able to do one of the deals. I wanted to do the Visa deal but my local store was sold out of the Visa gift cards. I guess you have to show up early in the week when they have these deals.