Prepaid cards come in many shapes, sizes and colors. You have reload cards – some of which are ridiculously valuable, ala Vanilla Reloads, and others have less flexibility. Some cards can be added to a Bluebird account at a Wal-Mart money center, some can be cashed out at a bank or ATM and others can be depleted through Amazon Payments. Thus, the goal is to buy a pre-paid card (and often pay the extra fee), and find a way to extract the money from the card. Again, this “manufactured spending” is where you essentially buy cash, expecting the rewards to outweigh the fees.
Let’s look at this week’s CVS deal on Paypal Prepaid cards:
What a Deal!
Purchase a $150 prepaid Paypal-branded Mastercard debit and receive $50 in Extrabucks (essentially $50 cash that can be spent at CVS). While this ad states “limit 1 per household,” that restriction was not there when the offer first came out. So I walked 2 minutes to my local CVS, bought a $150 Paypal Prepaid card for $154.95 (because of the $4.95 fee) and received $50. I bought a 2nd $150 Paypal Prepaid card for $154.95 and received another $50. NSPfiance did the same thing. That left us with $600 cash held in prepaid cards, $19.80 in fees and $200 in Extrabucks to spend at CVS.
So what did we do? Amazon Payments allows you to send up to $1,000 for goods/services each month via credit cards. As NSPfiance purchased a number of items recently for the condo, including picking up the tab for painting, I owed her a decent sum of money. So I added the Paypal Prepaid cards to my Amazon Payments account, and sent the cash to NSPfiance. That left us with paying $19.80 in fees and receiving $200 to spend at CVS (not to mention the points earned from credit card spend).
The key is to know the differences in the cards and the fastest/best way to deplete them. I was once stuck with $1,000 in AMEX Prepaid cards that I just had to spend down because I bought the wrong version. While this isn’t easy, and like anything takes some time to learn, the rewards are endless. Once you have the knowledge, the process is very quick and painless. As you see from the above, not a bad haul for ~15 minutes of my time.
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