Has anyone found a way to pay their mortgage with a miles card?

Question

Has anyone found a way to use a rewards credit card to pay their mortgages?

If there was a way to pay the mortgage with one of these cards you would get a lot of miles a year.

If you had 5,000 a month in mortgage 5000 x 12 months (1 dollar a point)

60k miles - 2 flight

That would be fine by me.  Just pay using my card and at the end of the year, i get 2 tickets for free.

Here is the rub, the mortgage companies will not take a card for payment.  you can take a cash advance or buy a money order, but it all starts to get complicated and the fees start to eat up the rewards.

Any suggestions?

Jay Hinrichs · Answer

Have not looked into it but I be the AMEX black or titanium card may do the trick.. but you pay I think 5k for the privlage to have one of those..

Derek Luttrell · Answer

If your lender lets you pay with a debit card and not just your bank account, you can use your credit card to load a pre-paid Visa gift card from the grocery store.

I've paid rent this way back before I owned. My Amex gives me 6% cash back at grocery stores, so I would load up a gift card with $900, get $54 back through Amex, then use the gift card to pay rent until I achieved the sign up bonus I was gunning for. It was annoying, but I wouldn't have spent $3,000 in 3 months otherwise.

Jim S. · Answer

The processing fees you get charged by Plastiq, Tio, etc. will be worse than the rewards you gain typically. Typical fees are ~3%, typical rewards on something like this will be 1 mile (i.e. 1.5 cents) so you're losing 1.5% per transaction.

The important exception is on the sign-up bonuses like the 50k miles offer for chase sapphire preferred (equal to ~$700 in travel). It's well worth it to pay some big bills & the CC processing fees to get these offers.

Just gotta watch to not do it too often - my credit score is probably a few points lower than it would be if I hadn't been scooping up bonuses the past 2 years. Long term probably good for my credit though as I have 6 figures of revolving credit from multiple sources with ~1-2% utilization at any time (balances always paid in full at end of the month).

Avi Garg · Answer

@Lesley Resnick  I look at this way. A round trip to Europe in business class is 100k miles. Thats roughly $1000 @ 1 cent/mile. I would have spent ~$1000 to buy economy ticket. I do not make or save money but get to travel more comfortably.

I did act as a broker of miles once. I bought at 1.1 cents/miles and sold at 1.5 cents/mile and pocketed $400.

Lesley Resnick · Answer

I love it as a concept, but can you make enough at .015 vs .01 to be worth the time?

Matt K. · Answer

forgot to mention, the no longer part is for visa cards which is a lot of travel cards.

Matt K. · Answer

plastiq won't work anymore... and tio still works even though they got acquired ...

http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/value-miles... so you can get est value of those points. If it was me, depending on travel needs I'd just go for some bonuses and then maybe pay rent to meet min spend. Get the SWA companion pass by maxing out some bonuses...

Has anyone found a way to pay their mortgage with a miles card?

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