You were fine either way. Gift card is a Verizon only gift card so you have to use it at Verizon. The account credit can be applied to the phone balance as easily as the gift card. BTW, until a change that was made last night you would not have been happy with the result of having the gift card. The Verizon system would NOT allow people to split payments, thus if the phone balance was greater than the $300 gift card then you could not use the gift card to pay the balance! Realizing this was pretty stupid, Verizon advised yesterday that they were making the payment system changes last night and it should be rolling today.