How do you all meet minimum spending requirements? Our mortgage is automatically deducted through our credit union. We do have a business, but it’s farming and there are major fees (sometimes 6%) for paying using credit cards. Many times you lose your early incentives as well. Last year we spent over $250,000 through the farm, but it’s all in checks.
I’ve gotten caught up in the spend a dollar to save a quarter mentality before, and I don’t want to go back down that route. We pay our cards off monthly. We just did a big house remodel, and don’t have many other “big” house expenses planned this year.
Any tips you have to meet minimum spending would be great. Thanks!!!
6% fee is way too high to be paying with a credit card.
Have you considered using Plastiq? Plastiq is a bill pay service that lets you use any credit card to make a payment towards a recipient (subject to some restrictions for Visa and Amex cards). You pay the amount due, Plastiq charges a fee of 2.5% of the payment amount, Plastiq sends a check or electronic payment (if supported) to your payee. Keep in mind that checks can take 7-10 business days to arrive. Plastiq is not intended to be a peer-to-peer payment service (for that there's PayPal and Venmo if your payees accept it). Plastiq's business is really intended for payments of bills and invoices, and it sounds like your business has a lot of these.
Plastiq's TOS:
For uses not supported by specific Payment Methods:
- For Visa cards, mortgage payments are not supported.
- For Payments to Recipients in the United States, the use of American Express cards is not supported beyond the following industries: Government, Utilities, Education, Residential Rent, and Club Fees & Memberships.
Note that under the above terms, you could be paying your mortgage with a Mastercard or Discover. You could be paying your business expenses with a Visa. You could be paying taxes and utilities with an Amex. (Amex introduced a Vendor Pay feature this week, which could work with your business expenses, but I haven't had a chance to read up on it.)
The hitch is Plastiq's 2.5% fee.
There really aren't any cards that earn a base rate greater than 2.5% to make these payments profitable on an
ongoing basis. Take for example, the Chase Ink Unlimited ("CIU") or Chase Freedom Unlimited ("CFU") cards that earn 1.5x UR on every payment -- A $1,000 payment on Plastiq would incur a $25 fee, so your total transaction would be $1,025, on which you'd earn 1,537 UR points, which you can cash out for $15.37, transfer to Chase's airline and hotel partners, or redeem for travel using the Chase Sapphire Reserve's UR portal for an extra 50% bonus, worth $23.06. You're still not really breaking even. If you have a business, you can likely deduct the 2.5% fee as an expense, which may change the value proposition.
However, if you're using Plastiq to
work on MSR, the math becomes much different. For example, if you sign up for the Chase Ink Preferred ("CIP") card, you'll need to spend $5k in 3 months to get the 80k UR signup bonus. You might be wondering, how are you supposed to meet that high of a minimum spending requirement?! Well, you have $250k of business expenses through your farm that you could shift onto the CIP's (and other cards') MSR by using Plastiq. If you use Plastiq to meet the entire $5k MSR, a 2.5% fee will cost you $125. The SUB on the CIP is 80k UR, which you can cash out for $800, transfer the points to airline and hotel partners, or is worth up to $1,200 towards travel when transferred to a CSR and redeemed through its UR travel portal. Even with the 2.5% fee on the entire MSR amount, you're netting $675 to $1,075+ in value from the SUB. [ETA:
@miztressuz rightly added the CIP's $95 AF into her calculations. Other credit cards may not have an AF, have an introductory AF that's waived, or higher or lower AFs.]
I'm not suggesting you sign up for new credit cards to cover all of your $250k in business expenses annually, because you do need to consider your comfort level with signing up for how many cards and how the velocity of new card signups may be viewed by credit card issuers in approving you for more cards or lenders for credit and loans. But you do have $250k in expenses that you can redirect to meeting MSRs if you really need it at a comparatively low cost of 2.5%.
If you're planning to use Plastiq, please show some support by signing up through a DISchurners link. You'll get $500 fee free dollars ("FFDs") after you've made $500 or more in payments. That means the next time you use Plastiq, they'll waive their fees for $500 worth of payments (saving you $12.50).
Hope I didn’t steer you wrong.
While I was poking around on my chase account this morning I was playing with the credit score simulator and it got me thinking... what kind of hits can I expect to take by churning and how long do they last? According to their simulator, applying for new a new card and cancelling my oldest knocks me out of the “excellent” tier. But what does that actually mean long term?
This is the one thing I really dislike about Barclay. They like to do everything over the phone. Um, no thanks...please just text or email...
