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I use a combination of Vanilla Reloads and my Bluebird card to make frequent flyer miles for paying my rent! I had heard over on Flyertalk that it was possible to load certain gift cards onto your Bluebird using an automated kiosk in the Money Center of certain Walmarts without any fee. This would save me the $3.95 fee of buying a vanilla reload if I was using giftcards. And since I had just made 16,000 miles by buying gift cards on Black Friday it was a perfect time to find out how!
The first step was I had to set the PIN on my gift cards. I received a mix of Visa and Mastercard gift cards from OfficeMax and only the Visa type currently allow you to set the PIN. The particular one I used looks like this.
This card was issued by Metabank and had a sticker that said to go to http://visa.gowallet.com/ to manage your card. I may do an article on that part in the future but is is pretty straightforward: Put in your card info, sign up for a free gowallet account so you can manage any of their gift cards, then hit the Set Pin option.
You can load $1000 per day so I set the PIN on five of my Visa Gift cards and headed out to Walmart which was kind of a haul since there aren’t any near Miami Beach. Now don’t do what I did, which was just drive to the closest one I found! Because not all of the Walmarts have the kiosks in the money center! So I went to another one and it had the kiosk but it was out of order! Then I went to yet another one and there was no kiosk to be found! Argh! But I really wanted to cover this process for this article so I was unphased. The fourth location finally had one. But since then I read on flyertalk about a great way to find them without wasting time like I did. You can use this Moneypass ATM locator to find for a moneypass ATM machine. You will need to find one that is inside a Walmart because if it shows a moneypass ATM at a Walmart location, it should be the kiosk we are after. When you arrive at Walmart, this is what the kiosk in the money center should look like.
Here is step by step how to load the gift cards onto your Bluebird.
1. First select the Bluebird option under card Services
2. Select Add Money
3. Click continue
4. Swipe your bluebird card on the pinpad (credit card swipe thing)
5. Select the amount you want to load. Since I was using $200 gift cards, I put in $200 here.
6. Click Finish and Pay
7. Select Debit as your payment type
8. Now swipe your gift card on the pinpad.
9. Swipe your card and enter your PIN
10. Say No to Cash Back
11. Finally confirm the amount.
And that is it! You now have loaded funds from your gift card to your Bluebird for no fee. I repeated this 4 more times to load $1000 on my Bluebird. $1000/day is the limit you can load and you can load up to $5000 a month. Now I can log onto my Bluebird card and pay off my Ink Bold card that I used to pay for the gift cards on black Friday. And I get to keep the 16,000 miles for my trouble! That will be enough to get my plane ticket to visit my family over Christmas. Yeah!
I hope this helps some of you to turn your gift cards into usable cash in your Bluebird account. Let me know if you have any questions.
