How to Buy Gift Cards for Less

Last year a teacher that I know told me that she raked in $250 worth in gift cards from her students during the holidays. Yep, gift cards are the perfect gift: easy to buy, easy to wrap, and don't require much thought. But did you know that with just a little effort you can purchase them for less than face value—giving you a great savings and your recipient a nice gift?

Type in “gift card” on eBay and up come a wide variety of gift cards for auction. I spent less than a minute watching a Lowe’s $450 card go for $398 and a Macy’s $325 go for $285. As always though you’ve got to be careful with eBay only buy from top-rated sellers.

If you Google “discount gift cards” you’ll get a lot of sites that specialize in selling or helping you sell cards. On giftcards.com I found card $250 Borders selling for $217.50 and $25 Carraba’s for $22.50. At ABCGiftcards you’ll find offers 5-35% discounts on gift cards for popular stores and restaurants like Victoria Secret, Barnes & Noble and Olive Garden.

You can also pick up deals at warehouse stores like Costco. Costco members might find $90 in iTunes gift cards for $75 or $100 Wolfgang Puck gift cards for $80

Citydeals.com gives you discounts on everything from car rentals to movie tickets or restaurants narrowed down by location. You could make a purchase for a far away family member, a local friend or use it when you travel to find deals in the city that you are visiting.

Before you purchase any gift cards ask about any expiration date or non-usage fees that might apply. And be sure you're really getting a deal, not like these Target deals (credit The Consumerist)

Free and Almost Free

The Internet is a fantastic resource for bargain hunters, but some are a little more obscure than others. Here are few that I stumbled across this week mostly thanks to other bloggers.

Dining Discounts: Local TV stations sometimes barter air time with restaurants in exchange for gift certificates. This is done through an advertising company called Incentrev. The business gets PR, then the station sells the gift certificates to consumers who get a bargain. Everybody is happy.

You'll find deals in nearly every city. So keep this in mind when you are travelling too. Just go online and use the call letters of the local new and add ".incentrev.com" to the end. So in for Denver's Fox news, for example, you would type http://kdvr.incentrev.com/ into the address line. I guess not all stations are connected with the program though since I couldn't find anything for other Denver channels.

Free Software: GiveawayOfTheDay.com offers free fully-licensed, no-trial, no-shareware professional software. You have to check the site frequently since the free download is only available for one day. And you must download and activate the software on you computer that same day. Oh, and it's only for PCs, no MAC software is featured.

In this case the developer of the software gets advertising and feedback on their product. What's in it for you is that this is usually high-quality and tested software. You're less likely to get junk or viruses--though I won't go as far as to personal guarantee that. You probably won’t find something useful every day, but it’s worth adding the feed to your RSS reader.