Buzz
After receiving a $50 Visa gift card for Christmas, I spent $48 on four pairs of socks, embracing the fact that socks are now on my wish list as an adult.
The tricky part was what to do with the remaining $2. Should I carry this card in my wallet, waiting for a time when I could buy something small like a bottle of water or gum? Or just toss it, feeling fortunate to have used 96% of its value?
The challenge with these prepaid gift cards is they aren’t great for online shopping. If I had added one more pair of socks—perhaps some with toes—to my cart, the total would’ve exceeded $50, and I wouldn’t have been able to use my Visa gift card for the purchase.
Why? Because online stores don’t treat these types of gift cards as 'gift cards'—they don’t offer the option to split your payment between a prepaid Visa gift card and another credit or debit card. To use a prepaid Visa card (or any other prepaid card), you have to pay for the entire order with it.
And so, I was left with $2. What could I do with it?
Here’s my solution: I purchased a $2 online gift card from Amazon.
I got the idea from Rachel Miller’s blog Just Good Shit, where she shares her 'little hack for using every last cent on a Visa/Amex prepaid gift card:'
After receiving a high-value prepaid Visa gift card last year and growing tired of constantly checking the balance, I came up with a simple, effective workaround to use every penny on the card:
When the balance gets annoyingly low, and you don’t want to deal with it anymore, just head to Amazon and purchase an e-gift card for exactly the amount left on the Visa card.
So, for example, if there’s $7.83 on your Visa, you can simply buy a $7.83 Amazon gift card.
I tested it myself, and Miller was right: you can buy an Amazon e-gift card in virtually any amount, whether it’s $7.83 or, in my case, $2. Then, all you have to do is use the prepaid card to pay for it—and this is the trickiest part of the process. Your Amazon instincts will want you to click or tap 'buy now' (which charges the gift card to your default payment method) instead of 'add to cart' (which allows you to enter a new payment method, like your prepaid card).
This hack is so handy that Mytour’s David Murphy recommends converting your prepaid gift cards into Amazon gift cards before you even begin spending the funds.
That said, I’m glad I didn’t turn my $50 Visa card into an Amazon gift card right away, or I wouldn’t have been able to spend $48 at Injinji. But using the remaining $2 for my next Amazon purchase works perfectly—and I’d suggest you try the same next time you’ve got a few bucks left on one of these prepaid cards.
