October 2-8 (2016): $15 back on $300+ Mastercard Gift Cards at Staples

The offer is back at Staples for the week of October 2-8 in 2016 at their brick and mortar stores. Buy $300+ of Mastercard gift cards, and receive a $15 Staples Gift Card via Easy Rebate (in about 4-6 weeks). You can submit the rebate online, you don’t have to mail anything in. All you need is your cash register receipt (online or printed, as long as it has the offer ID and the transaction ID which are needed to process the online rebate).

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The strategy is the same whether they offer a $20 or $15 gift card back. You need to get to the $300 amount with two or one gift cards. Since $300+ gift cards are unicorns (for the most part), you’d have to get there with two of them, eg $200 and $100. The activation fees make it very close, $7 for the $200 and $6 for the $100, so you are squeezing a $2 profit on a $300 investment. It’s a 0.64% return on investment with a one-month vesting period, so it beats checking and savings accounts 🙂

This becomes a better deal if you have a credit card that gives you cashback rewards on office supplies that are higher than your everyday purchases. So for example if you have the Chase Ink that gets you 5% on office supplies, you can buy the Mastercards with these offer, and then use them to purchase items that get you 1% cashback rewards. So just like that, you earned $12 in cashback rewards with this offer (4% of $300), in addition to the $2 “profit” 🙂