jpersonette11

Looking to determine the most economical and creative way to use a large quantity of these MC prepaids before they expire at the end of the month (2/29/24). I had them to use towards 5 residential projects this past year, but I ran into some major issues and none of them got started. Those are now pushed to 2024 but I need to make sure I capture every dollar on these cards. They are the "Exclusively Yours" Mastercard GC from Blackhawk. They work on maybe 170 various vendors. The only vendor I cared about at the time was Home Depot. But now I feel I need to come up with a plan to either purchase and re-sell, or some other way that I can scale and have an exit strategy. There are thousands of people on here that do way more MF or creative spend, so I am all ears to any ideas. No matter how far fetched they may sound. If it's easier to DM me, please do so, and thanks to everyone in advance.

Here is the merchant list...when the page pulls up, scroll to the bottom to click on entire list.
https://myprepaidcenter.com/page/eycard-mastercard

These are only some I felt had at least some awareness of:

RETAIL:
Crate and Barrel
CB2
Wayfair (Joss and Main, All Modern, Birch and Lane, Perigold)
Home Depot
West Elm
TJ Maxx
Marshalls
Macys Express

TRAVEL:
Carnival
Celebrity
Miraval
Fairmont
Wynn

ENTERTAINMENT:
Top Golf
Panera

radonc1

A bit confused.
If you are talking MCGCs
You should be able to renew them without charge. The government eliminated the banks from charging a dormancy fee a number of years ago. See link.
If your bank did allow a fee after 5 years, just make a single charge of $1 and the card is good for another year. If they then expire, the bank has to replace them.
It there is no notification of a dormancy fee, then they can’t charge you one .


.https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consu...circumstances.

Bigzamboni

It even says "funds do not expire" on the front of the card.

They discontinued a couple of merchants lately. Maybe that can get you a refund.

dordal

I think you could also use them to buy gift cards from the store in question (eg a Home Depot GC). That will extend the life of the money, although lock you into a certain store.

I like the idea of complaining about the loss of stores and trying to get a refund better.

Gitangali

can you not drain these at walmart and or post office for MO?

ericdabbs

LOL for a MO? If its like <$5 what is the point. Also at WM you can split at most 4 cards and even nowadays that is frowned upon even if you split 1 card.

Gitangali

How do we know if its less than $5, OP didnt say how many cards they have and whether they are small denominaotor etc, this would be vital info if anyone is going to provide anything meaningful.

puchong

Our local Walmart & POs will not touch Gift Cards of any flavour; does anyone have other ideas for liquidating Visa gift cards without using them for actual personal spend, like gas & groceries?

Klemhuzzah

As someone pointed out, the funds do not expire, and you can get new cards issued. If you're lucky, they'll combine them all into one new card.

jpersonette11

Thanks everyone. Cards are in $500 values.
But you cannot use anywhere else other than the 140 vendors.
I cannot place orders for future residential projects this year because of storage and other purposes.

I have 8 days left before the end of the month.

As someone else mentioned above, I have been trying to just buy HD gifts cards in store for the same denomination.
But as we all know, some people (that are not familiar with this world) seems the worst and think I'm doing something wrong.
Doing this everyday for nearly 8 hours trying to work through them all. In one sitting I can buy 5 to 10 at one time.

We are stull going to keep doing that thru 2/29/24 and see where the dust settles.

There are way too many cards remaining....and I purchased these a year ago from someone that approached me.
So I will only deal with the refund/funds thing if I can get to a small enough number.

I am going to switch strategy and figure out a large list to buy and resell. That maybe is close to the $500 value and also is not supper big to store and stack. I may also look into some large ticket items. For example, Cabela's sells UTV, boats, and more. That was never the plan, but I'm not going to waste a single dollar.

From the list, if anyone has an opinion of what they feel sells well or could sell well, that would be a huge help. But I'm doing my own due diligence now too.
If anyone has any other ideas with any of this.....that would be great.

Unfortunately I have learned that you cannot get any vendor GC online with these.
So it seems they only work in store.

Next step is just to ask a store if I can pre-pay a large amount of future capability for future purposes versus keep trying to buy GC.
But I have a tight window and need to find a store manager that understands.

soy

Could you buy something at HD, then return it and ask for Store credit rather than refund to original payment method ?
I did this recently but it was only for a couple of hundred dollars. The purchase had triggered a AMEX bonus. Later I found I did not need the item, but did not want the refund to trigger a clawback, so I asked the store (walmart) to do refund to store credit instead, and they agreed. If it works at HD you could maybe buy a couple of high dollar appliances (at different stores) and then cancel/return before taking delivery

jpersonette11

Thanks Soy
I have thought through some of that The only issue is that I do so much work through HD and value our partnership, that I would never be able to buy/return enough to get through my total value. But yes, we would ask for store credit if there were some instances. The only additional downsize is that HD only allows store credit to be used in store and not online. I have never understood that but that's their corporate policy.

Hobo_Joe

It sounds like you do a lot of business with Home Depot, so why not just use the cards you have to purchase Home Depot GC's to use at a later date? This would extend the life of 100% of the value you have on those cards with a store where you do a higher volume of business. You could also resell some of the HD gift cards to someone like Aligned Incentives, if you're willing to take a 7-9% loss on each $500 if you need the cash.