I’ve written often of ways to earn miles, points, or cash back by buying gift cards and reload cards. The best opportunities entail earning credit card category bonuses at drug stores, grocery stores, gas stations, and office supply stores. By earning 2 to 5 points per dollar, the rewards earned often greatly exceed fees incurred when buying these cards. However, you can profit even more if you find ways to buy reloads and gift cards fee free. Luckily there are a couple of current opportunities:
PayPower Prepaid Card
As Milenomics discovered earlier this month, PayPower cards are now fee free in at least some locations. The trick is to find a store that carries them and that is willing to let you pay with a credit card. You can use this store locator to find them, but you’ll have to do your own legwork to find out if you can pay with a credit card.
Note that if you do not want to register for a permanent card, you can instead call to setup a PIN on your temporary card.
Serve swipe reloads
The American Express Serve card is almost identical to the Bluebird card. It has mostly the same limits and the same bill pay functions, and both can be reloaded with Vanilla Reload cards. There are a few differences, though. One huge difference is that while Bluebird can be “swipe reloaded” at Walmart, Serve can be reloaded at CVS and some 7-11 locations (as of late 2013). I’ve verified in my local CVS stores that I can reload a Serve card up to $500 at a time for no fee. And, via two transactions its possible to load the card to its $1K per day limit.
Unfortunately, each person can only have one card: either Bluebird or Serve. Of course, if you have a Bluebird card you can continue to load Bluebird fee-free at Walmart using a debit card.
See also
- Serve or Bluebird?
- Bluebird takes flight and changes the game
- Best Category Bonuses
- Gift card PINs
- Pay bills online with debit and prepaid cards