My brother gifts us AmEx gift cards every year. I think he gets them at a discount so it does allow his gifting budget to go further but they are a pain in a--

My brother gifts us AmEx gift cards every year. I think he gets them at a discount so it does allow his gifting budget to go further but they are a pain in a-- to use. Unlike a store gift card, they are almost impossible to stack with other payment methods (at least online). Additionally, the test charges a store does to ensure the card is valid places a hold on some of the funds of the card (typically a dollar) making it virtually impossible to use all of the funds on the card. Typically, I end up adding them to my Amazon payment methods and buying an Amazon gift balance to myself and toss the remaining $1 of value in the trash. I also end up "buying" the gift cards from my wife and son since I'm the only one with the patience to deal with them, so at least we get most of the value off of them rather than letting them expire. It's now 12 days until Xmas and I finally spent us down to only $11 left from last year's cards.