A few days ago I got a letter from my bank telling me that I earned X amount of rewards point on my credit card and that it is enough to get some cool rewards such as iPod, gift cards and hifi systems.

Excited, I decided it might be time to try and cache these points that I always ignored. But before deciding which present I will give myself, I dived into the rewards web site to do some research on all the various options. Quite fast I noticed something weird.
For 5,000 points I can get $50 right into my bank account. For the same amount of points I can also get a $50 gift card in various stores like Gap, Sears and others. Same goes for 10,000 points. I can get $100 in cache or a gift card for $100.

I have to ask this: Why the hell will someone choose to get a gift card that limits him to use the money in just one place, instead of getting the exact same value in cache he can choose to use wherever he wants???

Well, as you can imagine I decided to forget the gift cards and look for cool electronics. This time I chose a few things that attracted my eye, like a stereo system for the iPod, a portable DVD player and a noise cancellation headphones.
For each of these things, I first searched how much they cost in Amazon. I was surprised to see that the stereo system which will cost e 14,000 points actually cost just $99 in Amazon. Now remember that I can actually get $100 in cache for just 10,000 points.
The same thing went with all the other products.

Conclusion: The best way to use your Visa points is to go for the clean cache option. it’s the less sexy option, but it is the most value for your points.

[Translate]

powered by