Many stay at home moms have busy days between caring for, playing with, and educating their children as well as keeping the kids’ social calendar by taking them to play dates and social activities such as story hour and extracurricular classes like dance and music. Add in housework and cooking, and it can be hard for a mom to carve out time to make extra money to help support the family.
If you are one of those busy moms looking for a way to make extra money without spending too much time, there is a clever way that many people don’t talk about–earn gift cards for free and sell them for a profit on eBay. Yes, if you are clever, it can be done. Or, you could just save the gift cards for yourself, but some people prefer the hard, cold cash.
Places to Earn Gift Cards for Free
There are a variety of ways you can earn free gift cards.
During the holidays, you can take advantage of many restaurants’ gift card deals. For instance, buy a $100 gift card at Outback Steakhouse and earn a $20 bonus gift card for free. If you already plan on eating at that particular restaurant during the year, you could keep the $100 gift card for yourself and sell the $20 one on eBay. For instance, right now someone is selling 5 Outback $20 bonus gift cards on eBay. There are 5 hours left on the auction, and it is already at $75.
Another way to snag free gift cards is to use a site like Ebates. If you haven’t heard, Ebates is a cash back site that requires you to login in and access the online location where you want to shop through Ebates’ site. In return, you get cash back on your purchases. The cash back ranges from 1 to 6% depending on if any stores are offering double cash back. As a bonus, when you sign up for Ebates, you can automatically get a $10 Target gift card.
An easy way to earn a free gift card is to use the search engine Swagbucks instead of Google or Yahoo. Swagbucks is free to join, and you search the Internet through Swagbucks to earn Swagbucks. Accrue enough Swagbucks, and you can cash them out for an Amazon gift card, among others. If you want to earn cash faster, there are other ways besides searching the Internet to accrue Swagbucks.
Finally, keep an eye out for trends. This holiday season, Starbucks printed 5,000 limited edition stainless steel gift cards. The gift cards had $400 loaded on them and sold for $450. That doesn’t sound like much of a deal until you hear that those cards are making their way to eBay and selling for upwards of $1,000! That is a nice profit.
If your time is tight, with a little ingenuity, you can find ways to get gift cards for free and make money selling them. No, you won’t get rich this way, but your efforts can certainly give you some breathing room in a tight budget.
Kyle Taylor writes about how to make extra money at The Penny Hoarder; check out the blog to get 100’s of weird and wacky ideas you’ve never thought of.
