Thank you all for the many inquiries that I have received over the past few weeks. I was able to reply to a handful of emails with my recipe for earning miles via a credit card for my mortgage payment, but as I mentioned to those who I was able to reply to, this scheme has been discussed before by others, so it’s not really a untold secret, in fact, one could use this method to earn miles for pretty much any large purchase or payment, I just choose to pay my mortgage this way.

Other posts have discussed other mile/point earning opportunities, such as buying savings bonds, but that ties up your money for up to six months and interest is lost when they are redeemed just after 6 months. Others have suggested buying travelers checks with a credit card and while this was offered by Chase Manhattan prior to 9/11, one was limited to $1,000 per transaction and a limited number of transactions each quarter. While it was a great way to earn some miles, since there were no fees involved, including free shipping, 3,000 miles was the max one could earn every three months. Other ideas have been posted, but all include some type of fee, so the option to use a credit card for miles wasn’t viable, since you were essentially paying a fee for the miles, my goal was to not pay anything for them.

My system to earn miles on my credit card and then paying my mortgage, though indirect, is as follows:

The items needed include:

- Citibank issued MasterCard or Visa
- c2it account
- Personal checking account linked to your c2it account

Those three items alone have, I’m sure, already have some members of FT saying, “That’s no big secret” or something similar, since they know where I’m going now.

Once you have established your c2it account, you need to register your Citibank issued MasterCard or Visa and begin transferring funds from the credit card to the c2it account. Since c2it, also a Citibank product, processes these transactions as a sale, as opposed to a cash advance, there are no fees to pay, but one earns miles for the transactions. Once the funds are in your c2it account, you then transfer the funds into your checking account, write a check to your mortgage lender from your checking account where your credit card funds have been transferring into and that’s how you pay your mortgage with a credit card and earn points.

Although it’s really an indirect way of paying your mortgage with a credit card, you could use the same system to purchase anything and earn miles in the process. OK, some are saying, well, if I can purchase anything, why not just charge it to begin with? Perhaps there is a merchant or a service that needs to be performed, such as a plumbing repair and the company does not take credit cards. Recently, this happened to me. The lowest bid came from a vendor who didn’t accept credit cards, though he came highly recommended. Dreading the thought of not earning miles for the plumbing job, I simply transferred the amount of the plumbing job from my MasterCard and then paid the contractor with a check, in essence, paying with my credit card.

That’s it. I hope I didn’t terribly disappoint anyone.