Take advantage of American Express gift card cashback.

Generally cash back portals will give you a percentage of your purchase back when you shop through their portal. Various cash back websites are offering a percentage back for purchasing American Express gift cards. This is a great opportunity for some free money.

Given that I know of no way to liquidate American Express gift cards into cash I’ll only buy gift card amounts I can reasonable spend within the next few months.

Let’s say I plan on spending around $3,000 in the near future. I’ll purchase a 3k gift card from American Express using BigCrumbs which nets me 4.5% cashback on my purchase which is $135.

Since orders over $200 cannot be shipped via USPS I’ll choose Express 2nd day which is temporarily discounted to $5.95. Using promotion code AFL420 gets $5.95 off shipping. Therefore all I have to pay is the $3.95 gift card fee.

Let’s do the math here:
$135 (cashback) – $3.95 (gift card fee) = $131.05 net gain

Oh yeah, you can use a credit card to make your purchase and I prefer to use a travel reward card that nets me 1 mile for every $1 spent.

So I’ll net $131.05 AND 3004 frequent flier miles. Sweet deal?

or rather let’s say I make the gift card purchase using a regular 1% cashback card. I’ll net an addition $30.04 cashback.

That brings my net gain to $161.09 or 5.36% of $3,000. I’ve effectively gotten 5.36% on all the spending.

Now if I only knew of a way to turn these gift cards into cash so I could churn the process and use the money to pay off my existing credit cards then it’d be a little moneymaker.

Here are a few cash back websites and the corresponding cashback percentages offered.
BigCrumbs 4.5% cashback
Fatwallet 3% cashback
eBates 2.5% cashback ($5 sign up bonus)

Note: Today, Dec 14th, eBates is having a Cyber Monday II promotion where they are doubling the cashback on certain merchants. American Express Gift Cards is one of them and therefore you’ll get double the cash back. That’s a whopping 5%. If you’re already a member you’ll get an easy $5 sign-up bonus too.