How a drug store pays a mortgage.

The intent today was to explain understanding an award chart, when in actuality I had been thinking of finally trying a new tool to earn points for paying a recurring large bill that would not accept payment via credit card.  For many, the end of the month signifies many recurring bills like car payments, mortgages etc., coming due.
While many smaller expenses can be charged with out fee to various points earning credit cards things like student loans, mortgages, car payments and taxes are difficult  to pay without excessive convenience fees being added for using a credit card. That was until Bluebird.  Bluebird is a product from American Express that acts like a debit card or a checking account without a bank.  You load the card online using prepaid Vanilla Reload cards and use Bluebird to pay expenses as you would utilize a check.  Vanilla Reloads are acquired from CVS stores.  The trick is not finding the CVS store that carries the reload cards but finding a store that will accept a credit card as payment to purchase the reloads. Some CVS stores allow you to load the card at the register using a points earning credit card.  I happen to have one of those stores nearby so today I went in and bought two $500 Vanilla Reloads using two different credit cards with each transaction totaling $503.95.  You can load any amount from $20-$500 for a fee of $3.95 per card. I came home and applied the two $500 reload cards to my Bluebird account in three easy steps.  The transfer of funds was instantinous. 

Now that my Bluebird account was funded with $1000 I could pay any merchant or even a friend with a check sent from Bluebird to a recipient without any additional fees.  It was that simple.  What did I gain from this exercise? Over 3,000 points for a bill that normally cannot be paid using a credit card.  One of the credit cards I used was a Chase Freedom.  Every quarter throughout the year Chase Freedom offers bonus categories for purchases. 1^st Qtr 2013 the catergories are Starbucks, gas stations and drug stores. The bonus is 5x the amount of the purchase up to $1500 per quarter.  So my purchases netted me over 2500 Ultimate Rewards points (Chase points) and 500 American Airlines points.  Add that up over 12 months and you'll soon be traveling with little out of pocket expense.

A few IMPORTANT things to clarify, I made it sound easy, technically it is, but you must find the CVS stores that allow such a transaction.  I told you I went to a CVS store, but I won’t tell you where.  Many people who practice points earning religiously are very guarded about their finds. They will tell you what stores won’t allow the transaction but they won’t tell what stores do accept payment via credit card, you must figure that out on your own and keep it to yourself when discovered. The points earned from doing this every month can be like a windfall, but caution must be exercised.  If you overuse/abuse the system credit card companies will shut you down and take away your points.  Why do it then?  The rewards of almost free travel to anywhere in the world is the draw.  You’ll notice I paid a fee to load the prepaid card, however that $3.95 fee per card is nominal compared to excessive fees one can be charged for the convenience of paying a mortgage using a credit card. For me, the ratio of points versus fee to acquire the points is nominal in this case. Another word of caution, you have to know what credit card to use because some banks like Citi treat the purchase as a cash advance and you NEVER want to draw a cash advance using a credit card.  By now,  you’ve assumed this is too much work to deal with; how quickly one forgets.  Am I not in possession of a $26,000 plane ticket?