Since I was about 20 I've had a "GM Mastercard" that gave rewards of 5% that could only be used for a new GM vehicle. My father had one and got $5700 off his Pontiac, and considering most other cards give 2% rewards max, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
As I used it for the next 9 years, I failed to consider two things that made it a bad idea:
1) They added "per vehicle" caps on the amount you can redeem - most vehicles were either $1000 or $1500 caps.
2) It meant I'd have to buy a GM.
Those two things prevented me from using the $2000ish in rewards I had built up by 2003, when I bought my current car, a 2003 Nissan Sentra. There were just no GM vehicles in my price range that interested me in the slightest.
However, out of laziness, I continued to use the same Mastercard, racking up rewards I'd likely never use. I finally stopped this last month, applying for a good travel rewards Discover card and education rewards Mastercard (as a backup for places that didn't accept Discover) and stopped using my GM card.
A few days ago I get a letter in the mail - between now and June 30th, they are raising or eliminating the per-vehicle caps. Which means, I have $3800 same-as-cash that I can use towards basically any 2009 GMC/Chevy/Saturn/Pontiac/Hummer/Buick/Cadillac.
$3800 is a lot of money, and it's just plain-old tacked on to whatever price you negotiate with the dealer. However, I still am not particularly interested in getting a GM vehicle. But $3800 is too much to pass up.
My options are:
Suck it up and buy a new GM, trade in or private-sell my '03 Sentra and have a new car.
Private-sell my '03 Sentra and use the $3800 to lease a new GM car (leasing is also an option, same as cash)
Try to find someone who was going to buy a GM vehicle anyway, collaborate with them to buy and then immediately sell the vehicle to them, saving them some money and walking away with a few grand in my own pocket. This is the most appealing and most difficult option - I'd need to find someone who I trusted and trusted me, who was buying straight cash or had an independent bank loan, and I'd (I think) have to sidestep tax laws and not charge sales tax on the sale from me to them.
As far as buying goes, I'm just looking for something sensible and inexpensive to get me around town with good gas mileage. Which pretty much leaves me with just a couple options, namely the Chevy Cobalt and the Pontiac Vibe. The Aveo also exists but I do have a pair of testicles and I don't think they'd fit inside the car. The Vibe...is not my style, plus it's named after a female sex toy.
So that leaves the Cobalt. A base-model Cobalt with current cash-back is $13,800. I assume I could talk that down to around $12,000 (I'm a motherfucker of a negotiator) and then get $3000 off with the GM Card (some vehicles have a $3000 cap, the Cobalt is one of them) and then sell my Nissan for $2500-$3000ish (it's pretty beat up cosmetically, 68k miles) and spent $6000-$6500 to upgrade to a new car.
I'm not really looking in the $20k+ range, so that puts the Malibu and Impala and most of the Pontiacs out of reach. If anyone has any ideas of how to take the best advantage of this situation between now and the end of June, or knows of a good way to buy and then immediately resell a new car to turn some of that $3800 reward into cash, I'm all ears. Also if anyone has any experience with the Cobalt and would like to share, good or bad, let me hear it.
Thanks.