PTC Arbitrage
Gifts are bad but gift cards are good.
I have long railed against the waste of gifts, especially gifts for someone with a joint bank account, to little discernible affect. I do not love gifts. It seems sadistic for me to glower at you with the expectation that you guess what I want while you glower at me with the symmetrical expectation that I guess what you want while we both know perfectly well what we ourselves want and could simply buy it.
But I love gift cards. They are a perfect way to manufacture spending in order to collect credit card points. My long-suffering wife rejected the gift of this great idea: we buy $50 Uber (UBER) cards for all of the end of year teacher gifts then get reimbursed by the other parents at face. They’re available at Costco (COST) for 20% off (and I get another 3% cash back from my favorite credit card). So that is an $11.20 spread per classroom. For reasons well beyond my comprehension, I was told that we don’t arb the Parent Teacher Council. With my interest in the PTC now fully sated, I moved on.
That one is out but there are other places to harvest discounts and credit card points. This site offers Mastercard (MA) gift cards without a fee through Sunday with code DADSDAY2024. This site does the same for Visas (V) with code VGDADS24. Both accept between $50 and $10k so you can do a total of $20k worth an easy $600 on a Robinhood Gold card or points/cash on whatever card you use. You can pay the credit card bill with… the gift cards. It is crazy that people use anything other than credit cards when you can get so much cash and points back, but there is still a lot of debit card and cash in our system:
But here’s the best way to harvest credit card bonuses with gift cards (I mean the best way if your wife won’t let you collect a spread on teacher gifts). Join Pepper for free with referral code 586145 and get 2x points or 10% back on purchases for 15 days. Then buy cash substitute gift cards such as Amazon (AMZN) and Walmart (WMT) in the first 15 days. They limit different accounts to different limits but you should be able to do at least $5k in each for $300 in Robinhood (HOOD) cash back or whatever bonus you get on your card in addition to the $1k back from Pepper. I would load up in the first two weeks before the 10% bonus gets cut in half. Use as much as they’ll let you get away with. There are secondary markets on gift cards and some of the cards have discounts far less than the 13% discount you can create with this easy $1,300 opportunity.
