Originally Posted by
travel light
Does buying gift cards do anything but speed up spending?
Once you have the GC, it ties up your cash until you use it. When you do, you are not using your CC for whatever spending would help you then.
It seems like the FT version of borrowing.
What am I missing?
People use gift cards to help hit the minimum spend requirements that a lot of cards have. Many cards will have an offer of spend X within Y days to get a bonus of Z miles. Sometimes if people are concerned about hitting X before their Y number of days is up they can use gift cards to make sure they hit that amount so they don't lose out on the bonus miles.
It gets compounded when you are doing multiple offers. $2500 in 90 days isn't too hard for me to reach but when I'm also trying to hit $4k on another card and $1500 on another and $500 on another within the same time span that's where gift cards can help out, I can reach all the minimum spend I need to so I get my bonus miles and then spend the gift cards later on.