I have a credit card that gives a a point for every dollar I spend. These points are redeemable for assorted types of merchandise, other kinds or points, travel perks and gift cards.  I have another credit card that rewards me with useless flight miles.  Every now and again, I check the statements and see if I can reward myself with anything actually useful or interesting.

I figure the biggest bang for my point is to get a gift card – it’s close to cash and if it’s for a merchant I regularly use I probably won’t waste it.  Redeeming points for actual goods seems silly since it’s seldom anything I precisely want and usually at a lousy price.  So here are some prices for gift cards, they seem to be pretty much the same whatever the underlying merchant.  The percent is the ratio of gift card value to points.

So you can see that the larger card amounts make more sense, assuming you have the points.  I was 95% of the way to purchasing one when I noticed that “cash” was one of the options for redeeming your points.  Cash?  That’s a great idea!  I can use cash to support local restaurants and merchants instead of megastores, or buy groceries or tip valet or purchase shady merchandise via craigslist.  I clicked through figuring there was no way the point conversion to cash would be as good as for gift cards – after all, the gift card has corporate backing and a high likelihood of non-redemption or of overflow spending over the value amount.  I was partly right…

The deck is stacked against cash at the low end but if you’ve got 25,000 points, it’s a wash with a gfit card. So I went for it.  A few days later, with no particular fanfare, an ACH credit appeared in my checking account.  I had turned useless points into actual money without a philosophers stone.

But here’s the problem.  (take note, economists and would-be economic stimulators) That money is now commingled with my other money.  I’m no more likely (or less) to spend it than the money I had before.  If I had a gift card, I would have to spend it to get value.  Or if the “cash” had come on a preloaded debit card, I would have to spend it.  But this money was too liquid and it got absorbed into the pool before I could stimulate anything with it.

People are a bit too scared to spend extra cash if such a thing even exists.  To goose spending, the stimulators will have to find a form of payment that will get spent.  Gift cards seem unfair as they favor the large merchants so I lean towards prepaid debit cards which can be spent almost anywhere.  I would forsee shady deals whereby people could cash in their stimulus cards for a modest transaciton fee (see also tax refund loans and paycheck loans) but it seems impossible to eliminate all scams from the system.

I’m working on some ideas for how to spend some of this “found” money for maximum economic stimulus value or at least as locally as possible.  More on that in future posts, but I’m open to suggestions now.