Hi all! Im not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I figure I would ask. I have two large purchases coming up and I would like to know the best option to maximize my mileage points and rewards to capitilize on the amount I would otherwise charge to my debit card. I am paying off my car (I owe about 10k on it) and I have a dental procedure coming up (costing around 5k). Which card would be best for me to use for these purchases?

Also, there is one caveat. My car loan is with Capital One and they do not allow credit card payments directly on their website. Any ideas on how I can get around this?

If it helps these are the cards I currently have:

SW- Business Premier
SW- Plus
AE- Premier Rewards Gold
US AW- Dividend Miles Premier World
AA- Platinum Select
AE- Delta Gold

Not a card that you have.

The best card would be a card that offers a good signup bonus for spending a lot of money within the first few months.

The earning on signup bonuses tends to dozens of times better than the spend on cards you already have.

With any of the cards you listed, you'll earn at most 5000 miles or 5000 points with normal spend of $5000. But there are cards out there that will give you 5x, 6x, or 10x that much if you do the same $5000 spend on a new card.

...

I don't know of any car loan that can be paid off with a credit card. Car loans are with banks, and banks never credit cards as payment for other accounts, except in the special case of a balance transfer (but most balance transfers don't earn any miles or points).

The only way to do is it use Manufactured Spending, which is a technique thus called because you can use it whether you have a big payment to make or not, because (in exchange for fees and legwork) you can turn credit card purchases into cash, which you can use to in turn pay off the same credit card (if you aren't trying pay off a car loan instead).

So don't worry specifically about the car loan. Either get into Manufactured Spending, in which case it doesn't need to be tied into a car loan, or if you're not going to get into Manufactured Spending, there's no other way to pay for the car loan with a credit card.

Manufactured Spending can be a complex subject, so there's a whole forum on FlyerTalk dedicated to it:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/manuf...-spending-719/

(But once again, Manufactured spending is 5x to 10x to 25x more "profitable" with signup bonuses than with cards you already have, given that you have to pay fees to do Manufactured Spending, and they're related to the amount of spend, not the amount of earn, so the more you earn per dollar the less the fee is relative to what you earn.)

1. Agree with poster above. Why not jump and get a new credit card and use the spending for the signup bonus?

2. If you are not going to have any concerns about disputing transactions, and these will not be earning any percentage spending bonus (like travel etc.), then use anything you value the most.

3. AE gold used to have 25k bonus points after 10k spent in an year. if that is still present, might be a good bonus to tap on.

4. For car loan payments, you might be better off paying them off from money orders, which in turn can be bought from prepaid debit cards, which in turn can be bought on credit cards.

5. Call your credit cards to see if they have any existing spending bonuses. Citi is famous for giving these to you.