I work in a canned chicken food processing plant where there is a machine that seperates chicken meat from the bones and puts the meat into cans. I am thinking that meat separator will probably be able to separate giftcards from the packaging. I will throw in a handful of VGCs and get back to you all.
Otherwise, if anyone has an antique Eli Whitney cotton gin, that might work too.
I apologize in advance if anyone finds bits of plastic giftcard in their canned chicken.
Here’s another data point. I have an individual health insurance plan since I am self-employed. The money was generally coming out of my checking account. I decided to see if that was something I could pay with a prepaid debit card.
It worked! And when I navigated to that section of my health insurance payment site, there was a note that said something to the effect of - we are required to accept prepaid debit cards as a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
So for those of you paying for insurance outside of your employer, this may be a route to liquidate several thousand dollars of prepaid cards per year!
I’ve done the same thing. Just remember to keep good records on your expenses so you don’t forget that expense when doing your books.
Especially given that you can deduct the premiums for SE health insurance right off of your income. Has saved us a decent chunk of taxes in prior years.
I’m not so optimistic here. People who are not self-employed and who receive health insurance from their employer get both the federal income tax deduction but also the 15.3% FICA tax deduction. Us self-employed people get screwed here since we have to pay 15.3% SE taxes on our income without getting to deduct the health insurance expense.
I have not been keeping up with this thread but wanted everyone to know I just posted a topic that AAA is offering $0 fee debit cards from Nov 24 - Dec 24. Sounds perfect for MS
Bad week for me. USPS rumor turned true and my GiftCardMall account was blacklisted (shouldn’t have used that stupid promo code).
Time to improvise, adapt and overcome.
I really need the mall to do fee free visa gc’s again, I got like 10k MSR that needs to happen and I’d rather hit it over 2-3 days with easy to liquidate visa than the current mc that I’m getting from grocery which requires quickly hitting the correct button on wally world terminals.
Random question: Suppose I didn’t want to MS big bucks but just a little bit for small rewards and signup bonuses.
How much monthly and annually could I deposit into a standard bank account in Money Orders before they got suspicious?
Certainly, depositing $9,999 per day in MO for every business day of the year would get flagged. Just as depositing a single MO for $500 once per year, would be completely ignored.
What is the middle ground, erring on the side of virtually no risk of adverse action? $500 a week? $500 every two weeks? $500 a month?
Assume it’s a bank account I’d prefer not risk account closure on, but is also local and convenient enough that it’s not an imposition on my time to go make one deposit for small beans on occasion.
Always reserve/seek several alternatives when doing MS. For example, there may be places other than USPS.
I think ppl were saying $2-3k a week is not hard and generally doesn’t get flagged.
You’ll run out of signup bonuses well before you have to worry about any bank AA (adverse action) for money orders. A few thousand here and there isn’t going to spook them.
I’ve had fairly good success using prepaid gift cards the last couple weeks in buying services and things that are not a durable good that I don’t plan on needing to return.
It’s leading me to a strategy of buying a prepaid GC just before I plan to use it to help avoid theft/fraud. For example, tomorrow I have a $400ish auto repair scheduled in the morning so tonight I bought a $500 GC for $505.95 at the local supermarket (technically I made it be 490ish so that the total amount was under $500 to hopefully prevent automated anti-MS tools from finding me).
I do wonder if this is worth doing. Essentially, it’s a 2.1% fee liquidation method since I could be using a 2% generic rewards card on this spend, and getting 30 days of float in a high yield savings account.
On one hand, this method let’s me avoid the hassle of Walmart which is a 0.14% liquidation method, assuming I buy a $500 GC for 70 cents and deposit it into my local bank. I suppose it will become a matter of scale depending on how much dollars worth of MO I wind up being able to get at Wal Mart in one trip before I get flagged as suspicious.
If I am only going to MS $6k a year for AMEX BCP 6% caps, then maybe I’m better off just buying $6k of GCs spread out over a few months, buying MO in $1500 to $2k per trip, and depositing $1k a week in my local bank. Then using my regular 2% credit card for everything non-reward spend. Even though I don’t intend on returning items I am buying on the GCs, it’s nice to have a record for legal and budget purposes of what I spent, that a regular CC statement provides.
What’s the best use of a non-signup bonus 5% Office Supply store card for MS? I have one of the Chase cards that gives 5% and an AMEX SimplyCash card - both are capped to $25k or $50k per year to get t he 5% back on.
From my initial research I see Staples sells $300 gift cards online for an $8.95 fee which is a 3% fee. Add in a 70 cent money order and I’m making under 2%.
In store, Office Max/Office Depot and Staples seem to sell $200 cards for a $6.95 fee, which is even worse than this.
Is there any better options than this available for a 5% Office Supply card? Assuming I can cap out $50k in spend across both cards per year, I make under $1,000 in profit and have to liquidate 168 gift cards of $300 each. That hardly seems worth $1,000.
I know people used to lose their sh-- over 5% Office Supply cards, so I imagine either an older method of MSing them got shut down, or there’s something else I did not yet discover over than $9 fee on a $300 card and hoping Staples doesn’t shut me down, the USPS doesn’t lose any of my 168 gift cards, WalMart is okay with me buying $50k of MOs, and my local bank is okay with me depositing $50k worth of money orders, and AMEX/Chase are okay with me spending $25k each at Office Supply Stores per year.
A lot has to go right just for me to make $1,000 here. I don’t know the Wal Mart MO daily limit but assuming I can do $2k that’s still 25 trips - one trip per two weeks if I want to spread it out throughout the year. Assume best case scenario and each trip takes only 15 minutes when you add in parking, walking inside, waiting in line, getting the MO, walking back out, and getting out of the parking lot, that would be about 6 hours of time. Let’s add in a few minutes to deposit the MOs, and I’m still looking at $150 per hour. That’s not bad! Even if I messed up quite a bit, it’s still $100 an hour.
So even though it seems like a low amount of money ($1k), the hourly rate of return seems good. The problem comes into play that it’s not scalable since I’m limited in 5% cards, and there’s multiple failure points as described above.
Very interested in hearing how experienced MSers use their 5% Office Cards - I think once I do my annual allotment of AMEX BCP, I will switch to Office Spend next!
Consider when OD/OM (Office Depot Office Max) runs their “sales” like they did last month. You could theoretically do $50k in one week if you have a high enough CL, quick liquidation friendly cashiers and multiple stores. Those are under $0 for the cards, so you net the whole 5%.
Otherwise Staples does $300 / $15 back deals as well. Keeping the cards for those and then doing $300 Staples Visas near your anniversary is probably a good way to maximize.
Also your .70 can be spread across 4 cards, so $.175 per card.
What sale did they have? TIA
They’ll sell you $300 of gc with $15-$20 instant savings so you net $1-$4 per plus any cb or points you might earn.
Thanks for clarification. In my limited experience of the last few weeks, the OD/OM deal was kind of a bust. I have several locations within easy driving distance and was only able to score one deal. Perhaps if I went on the first morning to all of them, I might have gotten more, but it was limit one deal per customer, so I’d have to finagle going in a second time or something. Also, if I have to go Sunday morning all around town and make a special trip, it cuts into the profit by a significant amount. I happen to pass several throughout the week but on different days. By Tuesday, they were all gone at the second store I visited.
Also, the $15 Staples deal seems to be one per household, and it also seems to be a $15 staples GC not a visa GC, so the value isn’t there. I could find things at staples I would buy elsewhere, like papertowels, but they are double the price in Staples compared to Costco so that $15 card might be worth $7 cash. And more importantly, limit one per address.
These deals also only seem to come up sporadically, so getting anywhere near $50k in spend per year in them seems very unlikely. I can squeeze out maybe 1 or 2 fake addresses to get additional staples rebates mailed to, but unless they run them weekly, it will be hard to get close to $50k.
In your experience, how much have you been able to get from Office Supply per year using bonus deals, and how much do you have to resort to standard fees?
Totally spitballing it, but I’d estimate I do about 50/50 on deals and then $300 Staples VISAs.
I will do multiple OD/OM deals if alllowed, and I’ve had good luck doing them the last few times with friendly cashiers who I’ve gotten to know and chat up.
If Staples is giving me $15 back I’ll buy 3 cards, which is $600 for $5.85 in net fees, still a good deal and I’m already at the store. Same with OD, when the deals are on they usually have tons of cards that aren’t involved in the deal (regular $200 visas, MC, etc).
You’re going to liquidate 2, 3 or 4 cards it is still one trip and one MO.