skitch23

I disagree with your comment about it having nothing to do with a roof job. The OP can only use cash/checks to pay his contractor and an easy way to do this is via MS thru BB. Now since he lives on an island and walmart is pretty much inaccessible, this particular solution won't work for him. But it would work just fine for someone else needing to pay a for a large cash only project... in fact my parents did it at the beginning of the year for their new roof.

JohnV

Yes, since I posted here I had read online about asking the contractor to allow a person to pay his supplier of materials directly and thus use a CC for some of the costs. Glad to see here that this worked for some and you got some points for paying for materials.

I will ask the roofer when we meet him, hopefully within the week, if we can pay for some of the supplies directly by CC to his supplier. Living where we do makes situations with major work needed more difficult than would be imagined, it’s easier to get an audience with the Pope my Mother would say than to get the most regarded roofer out here to come over, but once we waited & reminded him repeatedly by cell phone for long months he came by. Now he has enough pity on us with our horrendous roof (including a leak he temporarily repaired in the most vulnerable area) to move us forward several jobs to get to us before the heavy winds and wet weather come…..so if he says no to us being about to pay for materials from suppliers we still would have to proceed and thus lose out on points for a hefty bill it seems.

Seems like with a 2.9% charge to pay the roofer through Paypal would not be worth the cost for the points/miles? I have read something about American Express Serve which made it sound possible to make a payment like this but it started with using a store named Family Dollar to buy gift cards and those stores are not in our state when I checked them out, so I wonder if there is any way to use American Express Serve to pay something like roofing contractors in the PNW? Or would it be just a variation on the bluebird & Walmart situation with having to make many trips to handle this amount of money for remodeling a home?

vxmike

Have you considered that some of these vendors only accept cash/check for reasons other than the credit card fees? They may have zero interest in any kind of traceable or electronic payment.

I'd probably try the "I don't have the money and can only buy the roof if I finance it with my credit card" approach, but if you live on an island (assuming a well-off area) this may not be believable and unfortunately you may be a captive audience with this vendor.

s0ssos

The irony is that in the rest of the world, when you are isolated (like Iceland), credit cards are accepted everywhere! Much easier.