Questions and Answers

I’m new here and I’m sure that this has been asked before, but what’s the best way to use your ccredit card to pay your mortgage to reach the spend amount? I’ve read a bit about chargesmart, buying giftcards and something about a Bluebird kiosk at Walmart. What is the easiest way to go?

Plastiq 🙂

Welcome @tibj – well, you’re just a little too late with the Bluebird route. Amex has a few variations of prepaid cards. There’s Bluebird and a few types of Serve cards. These cards allow you to load up to $5000 each month and then either use their bill pay function or your BB/Serve card (accepted wherever an Amex credit card is) to spend those funds.

For over 3 years we were able to buy Visa gift cards using a points-earning credit card and load those funds into our BB/Serve accounts using the kiosk at Wal-Mart. Then you could use the bill pay function to pay mortgages.

Unfortunately Amex has added new language to the terms and conditions of these cards where this is no longer allowed. And they’re shutting down the accounts of those of us who used the accounts in this way. So BB/Serve is basically no good for manufactured spending* anymore.

* Manufactured spending is the process of buying instruments that can quickly be turned into cash and used to pay off the credit cards used to buy those instruments.

Hope that helps and sorry it’s not a valid process anymore.

[USER=13]@Travis[/USER] has been using Plastiq, and it’s working well: [URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/08/06/pay-bills-credit-card/[/URL]

Is the charge on your credit card considered a cash advance?

No, I’ve never seen any of the Plastiq charges code as cash advances. If you are nervous you can always try to set your cash advance limit to zero.

Plastiq has always coded at purchase for me. The fee is 2.5% so make sure you are suing a card that is worth it.