Buying Gift Cards at a Discount to Save on Everyday Expenses

Living in Hawaii is expensive.  There is no getting around it.  When I last looked at my spending habits, I noticed that groceries for a family of 4 is my single largest living expense.

While we often think about reducing our cable, cell phone or electricity bills (all still worthwhile endeavors), getting your everyday discretionary and none discretionary spending under control is by far the best way to save money and to afford paradise living.

Using Discounted Gift Certificates For Discretionary Expenses

To help me save money on my discretionary spending, about a year-and-a-half ago, I found Raise.com, a web-based marketplace, a secondary market really, for people to buy and sell unused gift cards and gift certificates at a discount to their face value.

In Hawaii, where almost everything costs more than their equivalent on the mainland, you need to extend your purchasing power to buy the same clothes, food, etc. for less.  Purchasing gift cards at a discount on Raise.com and using those certificates to spend on your everyday purchases has saved me hundreds of dollars.

Before I go further, if you click any of the Raise.com links in this post, you will receive an exclusive offer of $10 off any purchase of $50 or more if you sign up for a new account.  This offer ends March 31, 2017.  If your discount isn't applied at checkout, use promo code NEWRAISE50

How it works

Sellers of these gift cards are often people who received them from friends or family but who don't value them -- for example someone who got a $100 Cabela's gift card yet has not interest in camping.  For such people, a $100 gift card to Cabela's is worthless ($0).  With Raise.com, they can sell that gift card for $90 to someone who shops at Cabela's regularly.

The seller benefits by monetizing something previously worthless to them that they'd rather not keep unused, and the buyer ends up increasing their spending power by getting a $100 gift card for their favorite camping supply store at a $10 discount.  Win-win.

Riase offers physical gift cards, eGift cards (usable on websites) and voucher certificates (cards you can print out and have the cashier type in to their terminal to apply the payment.

Finding the best deals

While there are thousands of gift cards and certificates being sold on Raise.com, like any marketplace, you will find some certificates are in greater demand than others -- the greater the supply, the greater the discount.  The greater the demand, the lower the discount.  For example, you will very rarely find Costco, Safeway or Amazon gift cards readily available.  And when they do show up for sale, they are sold at a very low discount of perhaps half a percent and get scooped up extremely quickly.

On the other hand, CVS, Kmart, and Ross stores often have a multitude of cards available for sale at decent discounts.

Best Gift Certificate Deals On Raise.com

When you return items at a Ross store, they typically give you your refund in the form of a paper gift certificate.  Many of these Ross gift certificates are available for sale on Raise.com at a very decent discount of around 15%.  Because these are paper certificates, the seller will mail them to you directly which may take a little time.

CVS (around 11% discount) - you can save on your pharmacy costs by buying CVS cards at a handsome discount of around 11%.  These are usually sold as voucher certificates, meaning, you can print up your card immediately.  When you shop at CVS, they clerk will have to manually enter the card number at their terminal to process the payment.

Starbucks (around 6%) - Starbucks gift cards are often only sold on Raise as a voucher.  I found it easiest to just load the card number to my Starbucks iPhone app and then use that to purchase my coffee using the app's scanning feature.

There are of course many others available.

Some Caveats

Many stores' own internal policy is that gift cards and certificates cannot be bought or sold to people other than the original customer.  I personally came across this problem when I bought a Starbucks card on Raise.  I loaded the value of the card to my Stabuck's Gold Card and subsequently had my Gold Card deactivated by Starbucks for violating their company policy.

Raise gave me my money back but the damage was done.  Starbucks wouldn't reinstate my Gold Card.  The good news though was that despite my physical Gold Card being deactivated, my Gold status was still active on my Starbucks iPhone app and I just learned to add the cards I purchased from Raise to the app and to use the app to process my purchases.

What do you think?