Smartlife

Gift cards are a popular choice for holiday gifts: they don’t require a lot of shopping, they’re easy to ship, and they seem a little more tasteful than cold hard cash. This explains why Americans dropped $97 billion on gift cards last year and are expected to spend more than $100 billion this year. But receiving gift cards isn’t always as easy as giving them. Driving all over town to redeem your gift certificate is the least of your worries. What if you don’t have a particular store in your town? Or if that store has gone out of business between the time the gift card was bought and when you received it? What if you forget to redeem it?