Managing Retail Gift Cards That You Don't Know What To With

There's quite nothing as annoying as a gift that you can't use. People give retail gift cards when they can't think of the right thing to gift - it's supposed to be as flexible as a gift can be. So what you do when you get a gift card from dear old Nana that's from a store that you just don't ever shop from? It's a painful part of the whole holiday gift-giving rigmarole. A gift is supposed to make you happy; not give you heartburn. Isn't there some way you can use the clutch of gift cards you have collected over the years and turn them into something you can really actually use?

As it turns out, there are enough people out there who find themselves in this kind of position that there's a small cottage industry that's sprung up around helping these people do something about their unusable gift cards. There are all these websites, GiftCards, GiftCardGranny, PlasticJungle, and others. You just sell your gift cards to them, they charge you a 10% service fee, and it's like you're getting free money. Most of the time, you don't even need to spend on postage. You just need to register with one of these websites and they'll send you a prepaid envelope that has postage marked on it. With websites like GiftCards, you can just go to one of their affiliate stores in your city and hand in your card for cash. If you would like to exchange the unusable gift card for retail gift cards from Amazon that you can actually use, they won't deduct as much of a commission as they would if you asked for cash.

Cardpool, another gift card service, allows you a novel option. If you happen to be crazy about some Facebook game, you can redeem your retail gift cards for Facebook credits that you can use on games and applications on that website. And perhaps, best of all, in the spirit of Christmas, PlasticJungle allows you to donate either all of the value of your gift cards or just part of them, to a charity that you choose.

You can be sure that these options will turn more and more popular from now on. New federal rules have made it so that retail gift cards have to be valid for at least five years from when they are bought. And even when they do expire, the law says that a replacement card is yours for free.