Originally Posted by
roknroll
Can you wait about 7 months to make the payment? You could fund a Fidelity account and get up to 25k miles on select airlines, or get 25k AMEX points. You have to keep the funds there for 6 months, but could then pay the mortgage with it. Heck, you could even double your money with the right high risk high reward investment!
That's probably the safest/surest way of doing it, but is pretty slow. You could put the money in a safe fund that earns a few % too, to help offset the cost of waiting to pay down the mortgage.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...-airlines.html
The AMEX points could be the best bang for your buck, since you can xfer the points to Delta or BA for 50% bonus.
If the OP has a mortgage at 5% interest, he would pay $2500 in interest over 6 months to earn 25K miles. Not a good trade in my opinion.
I would throw the money at the mortgage ASAP and start pocketing the interest savings
(I'm sure someone will bring up the fact that one could be getting tax savings from the mortgage interest deduction, but even if that reduces the benefit to $2000, that's still worth a lot more than any miles one can find.)