Originally Posted by
itsme
This has been discussed many times in the course of this thread. Double miles gives miles at 1.245 cpm or less (when figure in the float one gains), which is a pretty good to excellent, even fabulous deal; ordinary miles gives miles at 2.49 cpm (a bit less with the float factored in), not good, unless one is going to put the miles to a high value use, that is tickets in biz or first, or is just topping off to reach an award level. But you do make another point, namely that one can't just buy great numbers of miles at will (yes, there is the costly arrangement to buy them from UA at some excessive price) and here is such an opportunity, provided one is going to be making big tax payments one way or another.
That's an excellent point.
As it turns out, the last few times I've wanted to use big rewards (e.g. 2 business class award tickets), I've always been a few thousand short and had to buy some miles. As you note, it's usually quite pricey to buy miles, particularly when you don't need many (given the absurd "processing fees"). So I usually take advantage of the opportunity to get miles when it's easy (i.e. as opposed to doing mileage runs to Asia
) and the "cost" isn't ridiculous. As you note, the cost is also offset by the benefit of getting 25-50 days of float on your funds before you pay the bill, though not too many investments return 30% annually. If you were planning to borrow anyways, then it is even less costly.
With all of the cash rebate credit cards, many people are foregoing 1%-5% cash whenever they use a mileage card. Is that a reasonable CPM?