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It looks like my payments will be going on my Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, and I’m even tempted to pay down my mortgage to really take advantage of this at least while it lasts.
I use Plastiq to make payments I’d otherwise have to pay by check (or electronic transfer). It’s great for rent or mortgage and car payments. They charge your credit card and mail out a check.
Plastiq charges a 2.5% fee and they also run frequent promotions. It’s worth paying this fee when you’re trying to meet minimum spending requirements for a credit card bonus, threshold benefits for reaching a certain level of spend on a credit card, or if you can earn bonus points for the spending.
For instance when American Express was offering double points for spending at small businesses, Plastiq was coding as a small business. That was awesome.
Here’s something even better. I already knew that Plastiq charges for rent or mortgage payments coded as lodging for spending travel credits on cards that either rebated or allowed you to redeem points to cover lodging expenses.
But now it appears that Plastiq rent and mortgage payments are being coded as travel on Chase cards for bonus points-earning.
Out and Out paid rent via Plastiq and earned 3 points per dollar with his Chase Sapphire Reserve Card.
I’ve also now seen a screen shot of double points-earning via a Chase Sapphire Preferred Card. That makes Plastiq’s fee well worth it. Though as always, make sure to pay long enough in advance for Plastiq to process the charge, process and mail the check, and your landlord or mortgage company to receive, process, and deposit the check. Paper is slower than bytes and bits.
I value Chase points at 1.9 cents each so at 2 points per dollar and a 2.5% fee I’m clearing a 1.3% return.
Hat tip to Doctor of Credit who writes,
Last week reader audi0l0gic posted a comment letting us know that their payment through Plastiq using the Chase Sapphire Reserve coded as lodging/travel. For some reason, I disregarded it as I thought it had always coded that way but didn’t earn 3x points. …It seems only rent/mortgage payments are coding this way.
Bear in mind that this is because of how specific charges are being coded, your particular payee ha to code as lodging to earn the bonus — coding can change and if it does it’s not something you can really complain to your card-issuer about or get them to make up points on usually. There are no guarantees of how long this lasts. But I’ll certainly be giving this a go.
