So I Figured Out Gift Cards Today

For years I have been given Visa or Amex gift cards during the holidays.  (I have never been given a MasterCard gift card.  They must exist.  No?)  I think we all agree that cash is easier to use, and if you search the Interwebs, you will find masses of people that prefer gifts of cash over a gift card.  I do like that a gift card forces you to spend it, however.  Cash gets deposited into a bank account and then siphoned out to pay for such exciting things as groceries and gas.  Gift cards tend to go towards special purchases or dinners out.  When spending the gift card, you remember the person that gave it to you.  When spending cash, it's hard to delineate your twenty dollar bill from the one Aunt Edna gave you.

There are some annoying things, however, that go into using a gift card.  For some reason, it's a pain to spend the entire value advertised on the card.  If you have a $120 tab at a restaurant, for example, and you hand the server a $100 Visa gift card along with your bank card to cover the balance, the gift card will often be rejected if the full $100 is applied to it.  If the server puts $99 on the gift card and $21 on the bank card, then all is well.  Likewise, I have used a $50 gift card to pay for a $47 dollar item, leaving me, in effect, with a $3 gift card in my pocket.  The odds of me using the remaining money on that gift card for another purchase are pretty long.

So here is what I stumbled upon this week.

I have been using Google Wallet for a while, both for online purchases and for NFC payments with my phone.  Recently, Google has been shipping physical cards to users whom have requested them.  It's basically a prepaid debit card, very similar to what PayPal offers its users.

I did not know what I would do with this card, but being the Google fanboy, I got one.  Heck, it was free.  Shortly after receiving the Google Wallet card, I received my first gift card of the season.  (The Visa gift card pictured above.)  So I performed a little experiment.  I added the gift card as a payment source in Google Wallet.  I then tried to transfer the $100 from the gift card to my Google Wallet balance, but was denied.  I then tried transferring $99, and it worked!  So now I had a balance on my Google Wallet card and could toss the gift card.

Today, I went into a store and made a purchase with my Google Wallet card for the first time.  The vendor had never seen one before, but when he swiped the card, it worked, and that was the end of his questioning (it functions as a MasterCard debit card would).  I then had a balance left on my card, but when I went into the phone app, I saw the option to transfer the balance into the checking account that I already had associated with my Google Wallet account.  That was easy.

One caveat ... Google withheld $60 for my $50 purchase, until the payment goes through.  I'm not sure how long it will take for me to see that $10 again.  I imagine in a day or two everything will clear.

So if you want the forced experience that is intended by the gift card, then go out on the town or buy yourself something nice.  If you actually want the cash, then you can funnel (launder?) the monetary value of a Visa or Amex gift card into Google Wallet, and then send it to your bank account.

Your choice.  Oh, and thanks Aunt Edna!  I write your name on every bill you give me.