moneyreallymatters.com

Recently we had a combined birthday party for my kids at MonkeyBizness bouncing place which is really priced right and offered option to bring external food for fee of just $10 additional to the party fee. We had invited most of our close friends and also Ashwin(my elder son) school friends. With a good and decent size party, kids had great and fun time.

At the end, Kids got lots of presents and many gift cards from various shops like Toysrus, Walmart, Kohls. We wanted to buy something for both kids in one place so we have option to buy bigger item. So I started looking for options to exchange or trade gift cards and surprised to know that you will almost lost 15-20% of the value of the card and so decided not to waste money on selling or exchanging it. We choose to use them in their respective shops and add little more money if needed to get better item.

Here are some options which I came across when I was searching what to do with our gift cards and may be it is useful to you guys.

Cash/Exchange it
These are the favorite options which everyone like to use so they can get some money in hand and use it where ever they want. There are websites like PlasticJungle.com, Cardpool.com, giftcardbin.com, ebay.com, where people can sell your cards for discounted price. You cannot expect to get full value instead they take 5-15% depending on the gift cards. They have to make money somehow right! Instead of going to these individual sites, you can go to GiftCardGranny.com and compare how much various sites will pay for a card as a percentage of its value. You can also try Card Hub’s exchange where you can exchange your card to another card but still not for the same price.

Invest it
Another interesting option, you can invest your gift card money in a checking account at GoalMine.com. It offers a limited range of stock and bond mutual funds, plus an FDIC savings account option. For a limited time they will be accepting gift card trade-ins as a means for you to fund your investment and savings accounts. I checked today when I was writing this blog and found no traces about this offer anymore. They accept their own gift cards and not other anymore. May be keep looking and they might come back.

Donate it
Last but not the least, you can always donate the gift cards to charity of your liking using a website Donatemycard.com. It looks like they have wide selection of famous charities like Redcross, Habitant for Humanity, GirlsScout which you can choose to donate your money after taking 10%-30% of processing charges depending on the amount to offset their cost. It is not a bad idea instead of throwing them in to trash or not using them.

I also happen to come across an article in the Kiplinger Magazine which had similar options and little more info. You can read that article at Kiplinger.com