Do you use credit cards to pay your mortgage to get FF miles?

That's a pretty typical FlyerTalk type question, and yes a lot of people on FlyerTalk use their cards for mortgage payments.

Gretchen-I use my card for anything that I can. Some items (like the IRS) charge you a fee to use a credit card, so I don't in those cases even if it would get me lots of miles. But after you get all your miles you still need to look at the value of what you are getting. I never use miles for a domestic trip, especially if the cost of the ticket is only a few hundred dollars. I have, however, used the miles to fly business class to Europe (an absolute luxury) where a ticket would have cost me several thousand dollars. There are all kinds of tricks to use and I don't mind researching those tricks and making them pay off. To your original question- my mortgage company did not take credit cards, but with other vendors, it is nice to be able to look online within a day or two to see if your payment was processed instead of waiting for a mailed check to clear.

If only they would let us use the CC for college tuition payments!

Gretchen, before you spend too much time on this ask your mortgage company if this is even an option. Mine doesn't allow credit card payments.

I used my AmEx card to pay the cost of a time share in Mexico in January. I did that ONLY because I knew I would have most of the money at home and could pay the bill without too many months interest. My mortgage, maybe a month, depending on the size and your ability to pay the credit card bills. We use the AmEx for Delta for hotels, airline tickets, etc. Something big but not for lots of small bills even though we could.

We use our cc to pay for everything that we can and pay off the balance each month. As long as you can pay it off every month it can be a great way to accumulate miles. It gets economically dangerous though when you cannot pay it off each month. We have flown business class with Delta on our last two trips to Europe and another one planned for August with our miles most of which were from credit card use. If your mortgage company allows it and if you can pay it off each month go for it. We even pay our power bill each month with our cc.

I pay for most things with my credit card and then pay the card off each month. I can't pay my mortgage with it, but I wish I could.

You can't earn points on such transactions because they are not purchases.
That is why you can't earn points on cash advances.

"You can't earn points on such transactions because they are not purchases. That is why you can't earn points on cash advances." With the Delta skymiles card you do earn miles for those transactions. I don't make cash advances but that would make sense that such a transaction would not earn miles. We pay our local utilities plus Verizon, Dish and auto insurance with our AMEX and those do accumulate miles for travel. Don't know about other credit cards though.

Where are those Dave Ramsey evangelical extremists when you need them?

Heck, even Dave would be OK with this - as long as you aren't lying to yourself about paying off that credit card religiously every month ;-)

Gordon, paying for things, even a mortgage payment is not a "cash advance." you can earn miles just like you are purchasing a TV set or whatever. We pay our property tax and insurance with our Cc to get the miles. There is a 1% fee for the tax payment but we think itis worth it. But we don't pay our mortgage. I don't know if our lender even allows it, but we got a discount on the interest rate by having automatic withdrawals to pay the monthly mortgage payment. So we think that is worth more than any miles we could get,mif we could even get the miles. I think most lenders won't take Cc's or if they do the interest rate is higher. Some years ago my sister found a car dealer who would take a CC. They put the car on the card and got 25,000 miles. And still paid it off right away. Not everyone can do that, but if you can it is a good way to earn miles.

My sister owns a big city car dealership, and many of the dealership's day to day expenses go on her airline credit card "for the miles." She travels extensively, and always flies in First Class.
Life is not always fair for us mere mortals.

Yes, and I bet your sister's car dealership doesn't allow people to pay for a car with their credit card (except for the token deposit). After you've skinned the poor defenseless carsalesman down to the last nickel on the $20,000 car purchase, that 3% credit card fee really adds up! Fees are even higher on those "double miles" cards.

Sam:
$20K car? Fleecing salesmen? Their cheapest car is $36K, and they average sales will $48K. 2% charge card charges would be $1K at that rate. No, they don't take charge cards. It's funny how many people pay cold hard cash for luxury automobiles$100 bills. It almost makes one feel like being a money launderer from time to time, even though any $10K cash transaction is reported to the government. In some markets, cash rules. In some markets, the average person has not one red cent to their name and no bank accounts.

It really makes no financial sense whatsoever to pay cash for a $50,000 product that does nothing but depreciate when one could take advantage of cut-rate loan/lease deals and leave the vast majority of that cash in just a mediocre investment that will return 14%. But if you're rich and stupid with your money, I guess you may not care. Still, 90% of car deals are not cash deals. Alternatively, paying cash for a home in some markets right now might be a great investment...prices are rising, supply is limited, and dudes are flipping houses like crazy again. So, you pay $600,000 cash, do some fix up, and sell for $850,000. Now that's a cash deal that's a winner (unlike a cash car deal). I'll make an exception to what I said about cash car deals: If you're buying a cheap car for a kid or maybe a cheap third car for the family, that's different. It might very well make sense to pay cash for that one.