Pay Bills With Your Credit Card and Earn Miles: 1.5% on Up to 3 Payments This Month for Some

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Plastiq.com is a service that will charge your credit card and mail checks on your behalf. (With some vendors they also make electronic ACH payments.)

Their usual fee for this is 2.5%. It’s worth it to incur that fee if you’re earning a signup bonus with the credit card charges, or you’re meeting a spending threshold for a bonus.

In April they briefly offered payments with a 1.5% fee if you used a Mastercard. This turned out to be a mistake, but they honored bills that had been scheduled. Since they only accept Mastercard if you’re paying a mortgage I scheduled out a year’s worth of mortgage payments for the miles.

Ariana Arghandewal writes that Plastiq.com is now offering 1.5% on up to 3 payments made in June,

This may be a targeted promotion. If you haven’t gotten an email from Plastiq, go ahead and start a payment. Fee info is on the second to last step, so you still have time to back out if you’re not getting the promotional rate.

I generally advise that it’s not worth it for the ongoing miles without a spending bonus. You don’t want to incur a 2.5% fee to earn 1 mile, you’re buying that mile at 2.5 cents. No mile is worth that.

There is an exception: for business spending companies can generally write off the fee. If you’re paying business bills via Plastiq.com your net cost is 2.5% minus (2.5% * your marginal tax rate). At 1.5% though I’m interested.

Some people who were eligible for this offer had difficulty using it at first, if you’re one of them try again those issues should be fixed.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Q: You can’t pay mortgage/rent with Amex. Can you pay yourself via Plastiq with Amex and then pay your mortgage and then your Amex bill?

  2. RE: American Airlines Gift Cards Triggering American Express Airline Fee Credits Again

    What happened to the post? Now it sayz: “Oops! That page can’t be found.
    It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try one of the links below or a search?”

    Sorry about the OT – was just wondering!

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