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Turning Your Discover Cash Into a Profit Machine: Make It Grow Through Gift Card Reselling!

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Discover Cash Gift Card Reselling

Note: I owe a huge hat tip to PDX Deals Guy for telling me over and over why I should do this instead of just cashing in my money!

Discover Cash Gift Card Reselling

One of the greatest joys in life is taking something and making it grow. We do that with money by investing it and children by feeding them, but rewards are a different beast. In fact, rewards generally go the opposite way. Over time they become LESS valuable due to devaluations.

Of course cashback rewards are a bit different. For example, Discover Cashback earned is worth the equivalent amount of U.S. Dollars. You can get them to mail you a check or simply redeem your Discover Cash as a statement credit. But what if there was a way to make it worth 10% more? Well, there is and I just did it with $2,000 worth of Discover Cash. 

Discounted Gift Cards

One nice thing about Discover Cash is they give you an option to redeem it for gift cards. Why take gift cards instead of straight cash? Because they often give you a discount of 20% or sometimes even more!

Discover Cash Gift Card Reselling

The key though is that all gift cards are not created the same.  For example, look at the screenshot above. Athleta cards can be sold for about 80% these days if your lucky. If you cashed in for those, then you would do a lot of work for nothing and other cards would be huge money losers. But then there are the occasional good cards. The $25 iTunes cards at 20% off is a good example of a card that might be a winner. There are others. Believe me.

Cashing In a $200 Profit

Discover Cash Gift Card Reselling

One of my Discover cards recently received its year end doubling and I had over $2,000 worth of Discover Cash sitting there. After searching the Discover site to find which gift cards were available, I settled on purchasing 50 of the $50 Nike gift cards for $40 in Discover Cash each. The total came to $2,000 in Discover Cash and the cards were at my door within a week.

After receiving the cards it took awhile to peel them off of the backing they came on and to remove the glue and the strip above the PIN code. For 50 cards it took me about 20 minutes of prep plus another 20 minutes to submit them to a company I sell to. If you factor in research and ordering time, let’s just say the whole process took about an hour. (I did use a Scotty Peeler and barcode scanner to move a little quicker.)

The Math

Discover Cash Gift Card Reselling

Since I was able to sell the cards for 88% of face value, I essentially earned $4 per card. The math works out like this:

  • Cost: $2,000 Discover Cash
  • Payment Received: $44 X 50 cards = $2,200 Real Cash
  • Profit: $200 Real Cash

For about 60 minutes worth of work I earned $200 (10%) more than if I had just redeemed my Discover Cash for a statement credit. Not bad.

Conclusion

Beyond Nike there are other gift card deals that may be worth pursuing so make sure to take a look at their site to find opportunities. I do admit that I was not going to do this at first, but after looking at the math I am glad I did. While it did take a little time, I think the payoff was large enough to justify the effort.

Have you ever juiced up your Discover Cash by gift card reselling? Please share your experiences in the comments!

Disclosure: Miles to Memories has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Miles to Memories and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

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Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
Shawn Coomer
Shawn Coomerhttps://milestomemories.com/
Shawn Coomer earns and burns millions of miles/points per year circling the globe with his family. An expert at accumulating travel rewards, he founded Miles to Memories to help others achieve their travel goals for pennies on the dollar. Shawn also runs a million dollar reselling business, knows Vegas better than most and loves to spend his time at the 12 Disney parks across the world.

Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

12 COMMENTS

  1. @spencer

    if you use “the internet” you can do more (i.e.$2k). takes about 12 seconds…

    This post is solid though, if you have the time and patience,
    however you may create tax issues as you should be reporting any profit.

  2. Slightly off-topic, but since you mentioned the year-end doubling, have you had success churning Discover cards? Is there some time limit between canceling out a card and getting a new one that allows you to get the 1st-year doubling again?

    Thanks!

    • Unless something has changed very recently you can have up to 2 Discover cards open at a time and to get a second one the first needs to be open for at least a year.

  3. Compare this to cash deposit to your bank. Discover limits that to $199.99 per day and the phone call takes about 5 minutes. To redeem $2k, you would have to make 11 phone calls over 11 days at a total time spent of about 55 min. No profit this way, unlike this post.

  4. How do you know which cards have the potential of being sold easily and with max profit?
    Perhaps it’s obvious with iTunes vs Athleta, but if you have to choose, say , between Banana Republic and Gap? How do you decide?
    Is there a resource that can help you compare and decide what’s worth your effort?

    • BR and Gap gift cards are interchangeable and as such are usually around the same rates, which is 70-79%. My guess is without a bulk seller relationship the best option are the Staples $25 gift cards which can be sold four 84% online to ABC/Cardcash and I’m guessing something similar for SaveYa. That would leave you with a 4% profit plus not needing to deal with statement credits. They’re electronic so you can wrap it up in less than an hour from start to finish.

    • I tend to write about things I have recent experience with. I wasn’t claiming to invent the wheel and wrote about it now because I had just sold the cards. Thanks for pointing it out back then and for commenting and contributing!

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