Luv Saving Money’s Holiday Guide is never just about gifts. There definitely are awesome budget friendly gift ideas but it’s also a guide to help you save some money during the holiday season. The holidays are expensive. Get nice gifts and save money, it can be done! You’ll find helpful tips during November and December to help you save money on gifts, decor, food and more so let’s get started with the first tip of the guide!
Use Gift Cards To Get More Bang for Your Shopping Buck. Here’s How:
There’s actually a couple ways to do this.
#1. Some stores offer rewards for buying other retailers gift cards at their store. For example, Giant Eagle gives you 10 cents fuelperks for every $50 in gift cards that you buy. During the holiday season they’ll often bump it up to 20 cents fuelperks for every $50 you buy. So if your vehicle has a 20 gallon tank and you’re filling up you could save $2-$4 on your fill up for each $50 in gift cards you buy. BUT that’s not all. Let me give you a scenario.
My oldest son has Madden 16 on his Christmas list. My middle son has a couple Nerf guns on his Christmas list and my youngest son has WWE 2k16 on his Christmas list. I know that the 2 video games will cost about $50 each. I’m thinking the 2 Nerf guns my other son wants will probably be close to $50 total as well. I also know I can buy all these things at Toy R’ US. So I go and buy $150 in Toys R’ Us gift cards at Giant Eagle and earn myself at least 30 cents off per gallon (60 cents off per gallon if I buy during a 20 cents off promotion) in fuelperks. Now I could take those gift cards directly to Toys R’ Us and buy those things I mentioned but I want to save even more money. So what I do is I jump online and shop through one of my cash back sites like ShopAtHome.com and use my gift cards to shop online. So now not only did I earn at least 30 cents off per gallon of gas in fuelperks but I’m also getting 1% cash back through the cash back site. And you could do this for a lot of retailers and some give a lot more cash back.
#2. Another option to save with gift cards is to buy gift cards from gift card swapping sites like GiftCareRescue.com (which I’ve personally used to both buy and sell) or cardcash.com. You can buy gift cards for less than the value of the gift card. For example, right now cardcash has a $15 Bath and Body Works gift card you can buy for $13.05. You’ll get the full $15 value but you won’t pay full price. AND you can still take that gift card and shop Bath and Body Works online through at cash back site to buy a gift if you like. ShopAtHome.com has 2% cash back right now and you earn 50 ShopGold points.
Even if you just want to give your recipient a gift card and don’t want to go through the cash back sites to buy a gift for them it’s still a good deal. #1 gets you cheaper gas and #2 gets saves you money right off the bat on the gift card purchase.
