E-Gift Cards
Below is a long rambling tale of woe with details concerning how badly sideways life can go and all the barriers you can run into. I felt it was worth recording the details when I wrote it but here are some key points I don't want you to miss:
1. E-gift cards can be used directly from your phone without printing them. If you are trying to give gift cards to someone at a distance and they have a phone, this can sidestep printing fees which may be money they flat out do not have. Printing fees can be a barrier to accessing those funds if they can't afford the fee.
2. I've had e-gift cards from various places and sometimes had the local branch not want to take them. For that and other reasons, Walmart e-gift cards are my favorite. They also print the balance right on the receipt.
Proviso: If using self checkout, you DO need to click "paying with Walmart gift card" (or did) before swiping the barcode or it misreads it as you trying to purchase it.
3. If you are trying to help someone in a real pickle, Walmart sells "everything," so a Walmart gift card or e-gift card is almost as good as cash if you have no other means to get funds into the hands of someone you are concerned about. (Assuming there's a Walmart nearby, which may not be the case when traveling long distances on foot as a "hobo." Ask me how I know.)
E-Gift Cards
Originally published elsewhere on June 27, 2020.
It's a Saturday. Last night, Friday night, my life was apparently coming apart at the seams.
The toilet quit working last night. Mercifully, that was fixed this morning, which I had no way to predict would happen. I didn't expect to have any hope of getting it fixed before Monday.
The battery in my mouse has been dead for days, but I'm on a laptop, so I'm just using the annoying built-in mouse. Having a USB mouse is convenient and makes me more productive, but not having it doesn't make my computer unusable.
But the battery in the PC's USB mouse is also on the fritz and that's a more serious problem, so we wanted to get new batteries last night. And came up with $20, but then my debit card quit working. So I had $20 and coulnd't spend it -- and still can't spend it.
I ordered a replacement debit card today. I asked them to rush order it because they closed their bank branch in my town last year, so I only have access to an ATM.
My credit card is maxxed out, but the physical card itself is still usable (unlike my busted debit card, which is now also defunct). If I came up with enough funds to make a large enough payment to more than cover the interest that was charged after I maxxed it out, I could use my credit card this weekend. But the $20 in my bank account doesn't begin to do that.
I applied for a bump in my credit limit. It was not instantly approved. It is "pending review" and will take up to ten days to get a decision at all.
I began thinking about e-gift cards and remembered a discussion I had with someone on r/homeless. A young relative or something in another state had just become homeless and had no bank account and possibly no ID and they were looking for some means to get funds to this young person so they could get toiletries and incidentals. I suggested Walmart e-gift cards and found that PayPal sells them.
So I thought maybe I could access my $20 by using my PayPal account to buy a Walmart e-gift card for myself. It showed my payment method would be my now defunct debit card. So that's a no go.
But it also offered to cover the $20 I wanted to spend if I was approved for a PayPal credit line. So I applied and it was declined.
This weekend is turning into an exercise in revisiting the kinds of financial problems I had while homeless. At one point, my bank account was locked up for a month by creditors and I had access to food stamps, any cash I found on the street while walking around and in-kind assistance, like free meals.
I actually got really lucky and had just been approved for food stamps. It took nearly a month for my application to be approved, so they basically gave me two months worth of food stamps all at once and then like a couple of days later, my bank account was locked up.
There are lots of people on the street who have no ID or no address or some other barrier to establishing a bank account. E-gift cards can be a means to get funds into their hands without ID, without a physical mailing address and without a bank account, PayPal account or similar.
I am fond of Walmart gift cards. I've had trouble at times with other establishments not wanting to take a printed paper gift card, like at Burger King in Fresno. But I've never had that issue with Walmart.
If you are paying at self checkout, you do need to make sure you click "paying with a Walmart gift card" before you swipe your gift card bar code or it rings it up as like a 2 cent gift card that you are purchasing, not paying with. If you don't realize it and you get it wrong and a gift card is your only means to pay, it can be stressful to have that detail go wrong.
Another nice thing about using gift cards at Walmart is that they print the remaining balance of your gift card right on your receipt. So if you keep your receipt, you have your remaining balance.
At some point, I figured out how to use e-gift cards directly on my phone without printing them. This has vastly improved my life because I don't need the library to be open to get access to my gift cards anymore.
I get about two $5 gift cards per month via Microsoft Rewards and when I am dead broke, I do my daily points after midnight and get my e-gift card at like 1 a.m. and go to our 24-hour Walmart in the middle of the night.
Or used to -- the Walmart is currently not open 24 hours thanks to the pandemic. Using my gift card immediately at 1 a.m. would not be an option if I had to wait for the library to open and, with the pandemic and lock down, a lot of libraries are closed across the US, which has been a huge hardship for homeless people in this country.
When I was homeless in California, I used to pay 20 cents to get my gift card printed at the library. That meant I needed 20 cents in cash to access my gift card and I sometimes didn't have 20 cents in cash. That was sometimes stressful.
After I moved up to Washington and got back into housing, my library card here gives me access to a limited amount of free prints each week, so I no longer needed cash to access a gift card. And then I learned how to use them directly from my phone, so now I don't need them printed at all.
There were many times when I was on the street that I got an e-gift card and it was the only money I had that day or the majority of it. I used to get Starbucks cards and cash them out because in California they are required by law to cash out your gift card if it is under $10. So giving someone a small e-gift card may even let them turn it directly into cash without a fee coming out of it, depending on where they are and what the state laws are .
I was also able to cash out a Starbucks gift card for about $5 after I moved to the state of Washington. I don't know the applicable laws here as well as I did the California laws when I was homeless there.
E-gift cards were more or less a miracle for me when I was homeless and they've improved in the time since I got back into housing.
Now I just need a miracle or three this weekend. Revisiting homeless-style financial problems isn't my idea of fun.
E-Gift Cards: Addendum
Originally published elsewhere on June 29, 2020.
In my last post, I talked about what I know about e-gift cards and how they are pertinent to the needs of homeless people. I also talked about my current financial crisis due in part to my debit card dying on me, which inspired me to finally write about e-gift cards, something on my "to do" list for ages.
So today I got to try it out. I ended up some funds in my PayPal account and was able to purchase a Walmart e-gift card via PayPal gifts. I bought a $50 e-gift card and when I went to check out at self checkout, it required authorization.
After two failed attempts, they moved my purchases to a register with a cashier and tried again. It then required a supervisor's code.
It finally went through, only to show that my brand spanking new $50 gift card only had $42.97 on it.
Hello, PayPal gift cards department: You probably have a thief skimming from your e-gift cards.
I had nearly $49 worth of stuff on my tab and I was like "Crap. Let me put a few things back." and some kind stranger offered to cover the difference because they heard me talking about how my debit card is dead, so I can't access funds in my bank account and I didn't eat yesterday.
So I got everything I needed and was only shorted by a bit over a dollar. I decided to try buying another card this evening through Walmart.com in hopes of avoiding the same issues I had with this card.
I can find no means to use PayPal on Walmart.com, though I found an article that says you can and also set up a new Walmart account and downloaded their app. No dice.
So I ordered a second card with the remaining funds in my PayPal account via PayPal gifts again. I want to order it tonight because although I got the first one within just a few minutes, all the warnings say it can take several hours to get a card. I want to make sure I have access to it in the morning because we've all three been underfed for over a week, so we will likely want to eat early in the day and that means going shopping.
Now I am crossing my fingers and hoping this one actually is fully funded. And gets here soon.
Addendum to the addendum:
I did get my gift card. It was for the full value I had paid for. It took more than an hour to arrive, so I'm glad I ordered it the night before.
Both of the PayPal e-gift cards required approval at checkout. I've never needed approval for the Walmart gift cards I get every single month from Bing/Microsoft Rewards.
I don't know if that's the issuer or the amount. I think I got a ten dollar gift card once through Microsoft. They are usually five dollars. These e-gift cards were both substantially more than that.
