Originally Posted by
mfFrom35K
These days with short term t-bills paying about 4% it adds quite a bit of cost to this approach when you have to wait 3 to 4 or even more months to get your refund. It was a better deal when interest rates where near zero. You have to have quite a bit of cash to do this and now you are giving up real money in addition to the credit card fees. You also have to deal with the restrictions on the payment websites to two payments per quarter. Just pointing out some of the additional gotchas with doing this.
Yeah, it doesn't really make sense to have a large amount of cash sitting around for the float involved here. People might have the funds in stocks/ETFs, but then you'd have to potentially pay cap gains taxes to cash them out. If you are relatively house rich, I guess you could do a short term HELOC to finance this which would limit costs, but it still wouldn't be zero. Definitely not for everyone.