Unspent gift cards? Here's what you can do with them

The holidays are over. The gift wrap’s in the trash. A fresh stack of gift cards — a bounty of store credit at merchants you may or may not like — has been stashed away, somewhere, in a place you’re liable to forget.

Sound familiar?

Americans love gift cards. They also don’t know what to do with many of them. Online financial adviser Credit Summit estimated earlier this year that consumers were sitting on $21 billion in unspent gift cards, a number that could certainly rise after so much holiday giving.

What to do? One option is to monetize those gift cards before they’re lost forever at the back of desk drawers or mistaken as trash. Here’s how:

Deposit into your checking account

You can transfer the balance on some gift cards to your bank account. The benefit here is that you’ll move that cash off the physical, easy-to-lose plastic card and onto something more durable.

There are a variety of ways to make this transfer, and there are also limitations to what kind of gift cards you can use.

Some of the primary methods of gift card balance transfers require you to have a money-transfer service like PayPal or Venmo, for example. And they’re generally restricted to “open-ended” gift cards that have an account number, expiration date and security code.

According to PayPal, users can link open-ended gift cards to its digital wallet app. Once linked, they can withdraw funds from the gift card and send them to a linked bank account.  Be warned, though, the app may charge fees for this service.

Find a gift card exchange

There are a variety of online marketplaces that you can access to sell your unwanted gift cards — for a fee, of course.

Sites like CardCash, GiftCash and ClipKard will buy your card at less than the face value. They generally ask users to upload their gift cards onto the site, and then they’ll make you an offer. If you accept, they’ll transfer your payment through a money transfer service like PayPal or Venmo.

“I always pull up three or four of these sites to see who's giving the highest price for my card,” said Bethany Hollars, content director at a discount shopping site BrickSeek.com. Hollars also said that a lot of gift card exchanges will allow users to trade their unwanted cards at face value for gift cards at other retailers.

Consumer advocates warn that some of these marketplaces are not as trustworthy as others, however.

Before you upload your card information, it’s always best to check out a site’s Better Business Bureau rating and read their customer reviews. It’s also a good idea to make sure the marketplace posts its contact information and refund policies in case you need them.

Donate them to charity

Check if your favorite charity accepts gift cards as donations. If you don’t have one, you could try the fundraising committee at your neighborhood school or your local house of worship .

Before you donate, make sure to get a receipt. If you’re giving to a nonprofit organization, your donation may be tax deductible.

Re-gifting

If you don’t know what to do with that gift card, maybe someone else will. Gift cards are, by definition, a perfectly suitable option to give a co-worker or loved one to mark a special occasion.

Jay Jaffin, chief marketing officer at Giftcards.com, advised that if the card you want to re-gift is scratched up or dog-eared, you can always try to take it back to the merchant and replace it with a new one before giving it away.