How do you use a gift card that has money on it? More specifically...what happens when the balance is low?

Factual Questions
21

If you know who the issuer is and have the CVV, just go to their web site. Otherwise, you are out of luck.

22

You can buy anything you want, and swipe the card with the partial balance first when you’re ready to pay. Let’s say you buy $20 of things, and have $10 left on the card. You’d pay $10 on the card, and $10 by another means.

Of course, if you really want to zero the balance, perhaps buy that amount of gasoline and be done with it?

23

For gas you’d probably have to go to the cashier. The pay at the pump method does a pre-authorization of a certain amount. If your card has less than that, the authorization would fail. You might be able to go to the cashier and say to put $5.21 and that’s all that you’d need to have on the card.

I’ve had luck using these money cards at the self checkout. It takes whatever balance is on the card and then prompts me to enter another payment method for the remaining balance.

24

This did not work. I tried to start paying for something with one of these gift cards with a couple of bucks on it as a split payment, hoping it would come back asking me to pay the rest of the amount with another payment method. But it just blithely accepted the gift card as full payment. For several hours. When it tried to collect the full amount and couldn’t, it just switched the full amount to my default payment method.

So I have one card that has over $5 that I can use to top up my Amazon gift card, and the other two I will have to try the POS approach at the grocery store.

25

Most POSes these days are smart enough to handle split transactions no problem. Otherwise things like SNAP would be more of a pain and would require two separate transactions. Frankly, if it’s only a few bucks the simplest thing to do is use it the next time you go shopping at any major store.

26

I’ve drained gift cards by adding credit to various accounts where that is an option. For example, I could add $2.54 to my Expresstoll account. That will drain the card, and the money will sit in my account until the next time I take the toll road to the airport.