Just saw an offer from Citibank Aadvantage MasterCard offering a reduced "convenience" fee of 1.99% on FEDERAL tax payments (reduced from the "standard" (wonder who set the "standard") fee of 2.49%. Valid to April 17, 2006 for payments made through www.officialpayments.com/caoffer.jsp. User must be primary cardholder or authorized user (darn it, I wanted to pay my taxes with someone else's card). Offer doesn't say you have to have received the offer, i.e., apparently not targeted.

Personally, I wonder about the value of paying 2% extra in taxes just to get some miles. I guess a month or so of float is worth something, maybe, to be generous, 0.3%.

I try to maintain a rule to pay nothing extra to get miles.