Many fastfood restaurants are individually owned so there is really no uniform policy.

Fastfood restaurants in Canada all have Interac POS machines, which work for credit card authorization as well. I always give them my Aerogold Visa and half of the time, it will go through even without any stickers displayed on the doors.

These merchants open and rent Interac machines from big banks like CIBC and Royal Bank. They often bundle the Visa card processing free of charge to the merchant. So they sometimes do not know they can take it until a machine returns an authorization...

So in Canada, try it and you may get lucky.

In the USA, you guys are even luckier. Some property management firms are starting to take credit card for rent payment. You can pay taxes, buy money order, do currency exchange using your cards... these are not available in Canada yet.

Interesting. Something to think about - a LOT of fast food places have those new cash registers with integrated credit card scanners. I'll have to try my AA card next time I'm there. Almost all airport fast food places, for example, will take a credit card.

Is it possible to buy money orders and not have it show up as a cash advance? This would obviously work to pay a mortgage but where can one do this? Go ahead get my hopes up...I hate not getting miles every month on two mortgages!

So where do you go (on line?) to buy your bonds and get the FF miles?

http://www.savingsbonds.gov/ols/olshome.htm

Did I miss this?

Thank you all for the many inquiries that I have received over the past few weeks. I was able to reply to a handful of emails with my recipe for earning miles via a credit card for my mortgage payment, but as I mentioned to those who I was able to reply to, this scheme has been discussed before by others, so it’s not really a untold secret, in fact, one could use this method to earn miles for pretty much any large purchase or payment, I just choose to pay my mortgage this way.

Other posts have discussed other mile/point earning opportunities, such as buying savings bonds, but that ties up your money for up to six months and interest is lost when they are redeemed just after 6 months. Others have suggested buying travelers checks with a credit card and while this was offered by Chase Manhattan prior to 9/11, one was limited to $1,000 per transaction and a limited number of transactions each quarter. While it was a great way to earn some miles, since there were no fees involved, including free shipping, 3,000 miles was the max one could earn every three months. Other ideas have been posted, but all include some type of fee, so the option to use a credit card for miles wasn’t viable, since you were essentially paying a fee for the miles, my goal was to not pay anything for them.

My system to earn miles on my credit card and then paying my mortgage, though indirect, is as follows:

The items needed include:

- Citibank issued MasterCard or Visa
- c2it account
- Personal checking account linked to your c2it account

Those three items alone have, I’m sure, already have some members of FT saying, “That’s no big secret” or something similar, since they know where I’m going now.

Once you have established your c2it account, you need to register your Citibank issued MasterCard or Visa and begin transferring funds from the credit card to the c2it account. Since c2it, also a Citibank product, processes these transactions as a sale, as opposed to a cash advance, there are no fees to pay, but one earns miles for the transactions. Once the funds are in your c2it account, you then transfer the funds into your checking account, write a check to your mortgage lender from your checking account where your credit card funds have been transferring into and that’s how you pay your mortgage with a credit card and earn points.

Although it’s really an indirect way of paying your mortgage with a credit card, you could use the same system to purchase anything and earn miles in the process. OK, some are saying, well, if I can purchase anything, why not just charge it to begin with? Perhaps there is a merchant or a service that needs to be performed, such as a plumbing repair and the company does not take credit cards. Recently, this happened to me. The lowest bid came from a vendor who didn’t accept credit cards, though he came highly recommended. Dreading the thought of not earning miles for the plumbing job, I simply transferred the amount of the plumbing job from my MasterCard and then paid the contractor with a check, in essence, paying with my credit card.

That’s it. I hope I didn’t terribly disappoint anyone.

Chase Manhattan offers a mileage earning debit card, where one can purchase money orders from the US Postal Service and earn miles for doing so. Drawbacks: there is fee for each money order and there is a limit to the amount of each money order. If you're fortunate enough to have a small mortgage payment, then this would work well and the fee would be nominal.

I must be missing something here. Why not simply transfer the maximum allowed by your credit card to the c2it account each month, and then to your checking account? You can then use the money in your checking account to pay off your credit card bill. In addition to miles, you would get the float on the money each month (and even interest in an interest-bearing checking account or money market).

How long have you been doing this? There are MANY reports that once your account has done $20,000 in transfers that it is closed down since it is obvious as to what is going on. Have you gone over this magic #?

I got shut down by them after four months, $10K.

Of course it works, but I'd think people who are smart enough to be here would know to run non-trivial transactions: pay for action once in a while, use more than one account, never repeat themselves - use your fantasy, for Pete's sake !

neophyte is correct in his/her statement. Don't go into your c2it account and simply transfer funds out of your Mastercard/Visa and then place then into your savings/checking account, you need other transactions, such as paying for an auction or requesting for auction funds from a winner. While I've only owned my home since Janaury 2002, I've certainly transfered more than the amounts noted above. While one does need to be careful of the "c2it police", as someone else called them, being careful and performing other transactions helps in not having your account flagged.

edg1: As noted above, the reason for simply not moving all the money possible from a credit card, then into c2it and then into a checking account is noted above and in other posts.

Do they still have $30K limit per yr.?

I've been mulling this over and had another thought. Tell me if it's feasible- I've never used the "convenience checks" they send with my credit card statement.

1. Get an airline/hotel credit card to be used only for this purpose so you don't have balances for any other reason. This will minimize finance charges.

2. About the 25th of the month, write a check from your checking account for the mortage amount plus whatever cash advance fees the credit card company charges. Send it to the credit card company.

3. On the first of the following month, pay your mortgage with a check drawn against your credit card account.

Downsides: you lose interest on your mortgage payment during the time the credit card company has it, and you incur a cash advance fee.

I'm a little unclear about what happens if you incur other charges on the card during the month. My concern is that if you send, say, $2000 for your mortgage but you have $500 in unbilled charges on the card, you have only a $1500 credit left to offset the check you wrote for your mortgage. You pay finance charges on the rest.

Are there any other holes in this?