I live with my parents so I don’t pay rent or buy groceries right now. As far as I can tell there is no way to convert the gift cards into money (into my bank account). I can’t add them to Amazon or PayPal or use them to pay off any debt.
Is my only option to literally keep track of how much is left on these gift cards everytime I go out? I have like $550 in gift cards from work that I have received over the last 2 years and never used.
You can use them as your form of payment on Amazon to buy multiple Amazon gift cards. Then email the Amazon gift cards to yourself, and redeem them on your account. That’s what I always do.
If you don’t want Amazon, you could buy store or restaurant gift cards (anywhere you know you’d use it). Then you don’t have to keep track of the total the way you do with a Visa/MasterCard gift card.
I’ve used visa gift cards to buy Amazon credit plenty of times before
Do you pay any other bills? Cell phone, internet? If your cell phone bill is $40/m and you get a $100 gift card you can usually make an advanced payment or $100 and then carry a credit on your bill for a month, then only need to pay $20 on the third month.
I think this is the best answer. It’s so annoying to keep track of balances over multiple cards. And split payments can be unavailable or confusing to navigate on some selling sites. I’ve thrown out cards before with small balances (i.e. $1.67) because too much of a hassle to use. This answer here is gold.
This is how those giftcard companies make their money. They keep the unspent remainders. I like to use these nearly-depleted gift cards to sign up for audible subscriptions and get free audiobooks lmao.
I used to create a PayPaloney request, and then pay it to myself using the card. Last time I had to do it it was tricky, has to bill my partner and add the card to her account. Fees can make it a little hard to get right as well.
The easiest thing other than using them would be selling them for face value to your parents or someone else that could easily spend them.
What kind of gift cards? Are they for stores, or generic Visa gift cards?
3 visa vanilla gift cards and a MasterCard gift card.
None are branded for a specific store.
How is a generic, visa card unusable?
If it’s not a gift card for a specific store, you can just use it anywhere to buy anything. Next time you need to buy anything, use it.
I guess you should keep track of it, but simple subtraction shouldn’t be hard. But you don’t have to, just keep using it till there’s nothing left on it.
Maybe your drug dealer will just take the card as payment if you have a good relationship with them.
