Is it worth to buy $200 VISA gift card with Ink at OD for daily expenses?
 

I used to buy $500 visa gift card at OD for my daily expense. Now, only $200 gift cards are available for $6.95 activation fee. Do you think that it is worth to buy 200$ visa gift card with Ink for daily expense?

Is it worth it to you to pay $6.95 for 1035 UR points?

I suspect, for some people yes, for some people no.

I think it's better to calculate the price of the points as 6.95 / 835 (1035 - 200) since your alternative is to get 200 UR points for $200 spent without any additional work. So it works out to ~ .8 cents per UR point. That's not taking into account your time, gas, etc. to purchase the cards at OD. I think .8 cents is a reasonable price to pay for UR points, but realize you're essentially prepaying for a discounted fare. For example, using those UR points to book a Southwest flight (without a companion pass) would effectively be a 50% discount (give or take). You certainly can do better on other redemptions, but it really depends on what your goals are.

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Thread transferred to Credit Card Programs because merely shifting expenses from one category to another is not manufactured spending.

Frequent Miler recently posted about this: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/freque...they-worth-it/

Whether you liquidate the GC or spend them on spending that would otherwise earn only 1x (or 2% CB - you should never use any card that gives you 1x, except to get signup bonuses, if the miles/points you earn are worth less than 2 cents each to you), the cost works out to a little over 0.8 cents per UR point. Since at worst you can cash them out for 1 cent, this is definitely profitable, but you could also be buying VR at 1x (assuming you have easy access to a CVS that sells them with CC) and buying 503.95 points for $3.95 plus any fees you pay to liquidate the VR if you are going beyond the $5k/month Bluebird allows. Assuming free liquidation you are buying the points for 0.79 cents apiece that way which is slightly cheaper. If you're maxing out Bluebird, this could be worth it to use for regular spending. I would only do this if you have a specific plan in mind to use the UR points and get more than 2 cents of value out of them, though, because otherwise you should have used the Priceline Visa or another 2% CB card to buy VR (or the US Bank Cash+ which you can get ~2.8% back at drugstores on until they get rid of the 25% bonus in July and the gold checking account bonus in August). Of course also take into account the cost of your time and gas.

Also make sure that you will be maxing out the balances on the gift cards so they end up at zero. If you buy something that doesn't zero out the balance on the card, leaving, say $6.88 balance on gift card, you will now have that tiny balance to liquidate.

If you are like the StartInSanDiego family, it's just not worth the hassle of keeping tabs on the gift cards. We are too busy to micromanage the points game beyond what we are already doing. I tried several, but it just didn't work out.

Our taxes were a nightmare of cross indexing spend for several businesses and personal spending. The gift cards each needed to be reconciled with the spend/deduction that it correlates to. Did those cards get spend on frivolous, non-business expenditures, or were they spent on things that are write offs?

If I miss a tax write off, that might be chalked up to xxx non-deductible spend that I'm now paying taxes on at a taxable rate that far exceeds the value of a point. Whoops, that's a bad idea!

Of course, YMMV.

I used to buy 5*200 visa cards in OD and liquidate by AME targets. The cost is:
5*6.95+3=37.75

The points I got are: 206.95*5*5=5174

37.75/5174=0.0073$/mile

If you buy vanilla in drug store, you paid 3.95 for 504 points if there is no bonus.

3.95/504=0.0078$/mile


almost equal