In CA, in order to use CC to pay property taxes there is a fee based on the dollar amount of your taxes. Mine comes to about 59 dollars. My questions are:

1.How many people use CC to pay Prop Taxes?

2.Has anyone found a way around the fees?

Thanks
kelly786

I live in New York and as far as I know we can't pay with a credit card. If we could, I would love to give it a try. Thanks to Mr. Bloomberg, our taxes will be higher than ever now!

I don't think there's a definitive answer on whether to charge property taxes since every municipality is different. I have read that some municipalities offer a charge option if taxes are past due.

You can get around the check requirement by using the same technique people are using for paying a mortgage.

That is a very limited option.

The next question is can you write off the $59 fee since it was related to the property taxes, which are tax deductable?

The City of San Francisco allows homeowners to charge thier property taxes, however, the fee is roughly 2% of the transaction. Since the fee itself is a convenience fee, I don't think one can write it off, however, at 2%, one is essentially paying for the miles. I paid about $125 for the credit card convenience fee, however, while I gained 6,200 points, I basically paid for them, given that the cost per mile is about .02 cents.

Most of the municipalities that let you charge property taxes are going through a company called Official Payment Corp or WWW.Officialpayments.com. Some of the government entities use their own web interface. This company also lets you pay the IRS for a fee. It is nice for those last minute payments if the post office is closed and they take quarterly IRS payments. They have received single payments well over several hundred thousand dollars. I remember this because I was stockholder in the company before they were bought by check free. A lot of people lost money on this internet dot com. I have used the service and besides the fee charge I am happy. If you check it out you can see they are adding new towns and government entities all the time. Also your local video store will have a video about one of their competitors that dot bombed..I forgot the name of the video.

You can pay prop taxes via credit card here in Austin; but they charge the fee as well. It can be worth it if the CCard is having a double mile promo ala AMEX.


[This message has been edited by hauteboy (edited 12-06-2002).]

At $.02 a mile in CA, it's not a great deal. However, if your card is running a double miles promotion, that's another story!

For Idaho, the convenience fee is 3% which is a racket ( $0.03/mile ). I wrote a check instead.

I paid a year's worth of property taxes during Amex SM triple October to net me over 5K miles for a $59 fee.

I don't, because the fee is much more than the value of any miles I would receive. But if one's property tax bill is large (over $5,000), maybe charging would be worthwhile.

Payment of property taxes by credit card is not an option in my community. Even if the option existed, I wouldn't pay for the privilege.

I pay my real estate taxes annually using cc's. My average bill is $9,200. I'm taking advantage of the UA double miles promo this year. Granted the fee is high for 18k in points but it's about as close as I can get to paying my mortgage using a cc. My mortgage co. refunds me the escrow balance that they would have used to pay my taxes so it works out ok for me.