To get miles for paying your rent or mortgage you need two things.
- A miles or points earning credit card (such as any of them from our Top Credit Cards page)
- The free Bluebird prepaid card (see our review of the Bluebird here).
We will talk in another article about ways to maximize your mileage earning, but today we are just going to cover the basics to get your started. For this example, we are going to use our Chase Sapphire Preferred Card. This card gives us 1 Ultimate Reward point per $1 spent. There are three steps in this process:
- Buy gift cards that total the amount of your rent
- Deposit the gift cards into your Bluebird account
- Pay your rent or mortgage from your Bluebird account
1. Buy gift cards that total the amount of your rent.
Gift cards are available at a number of merchants such as Kroger, Publix, CVS and more but not all gift cards will work. We prefer to use the Visa Gift cards that you can buy at Simon’s Malls because they only charge $3.95 / $500 card. The gift cards are sold at the customer service kiosk and will look like this:
For the sake of our example we are going to assume that your rent is $1000 per month. To pay $1,000 you will need to buy two $500 Visa Gift cards with a fee of $3.95 each. Pay for the cards with your mile earning credit card of choice. You will get 1000 Ultimate Rewards points for the purchase if you use your Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, but you can use whichever miles earning credit card you like. You will need to go through the process in this article to set the PIN codes for the gift cards before the next step.
2. Use the Gift cards to load your Bluebird account at Walmart
Both of these options will require going into a Walmart.
A. If your Walmart has one of these ATM looking machines that is working, then follow this article on how to use the Kiosk to reload your Bluebird with a gift card and PIN.
B) If your Walmart doesn’t have one of the kiosks then you can load at any register, the customer service desk, or the Money Center. Follow this article on how to load a Bluebird Card at the Walmart register with a gift card.
Bluebird has a maximum load amount of $2500 per day, so if your rent or mortgage is over that amount, you will need to wait until the next day to enter more reloads. There is also a $5000 limit each month on Bluebird deposits so you would only be able to do this for $5000 of your payment each month.
3. Pay your rent from your Bluebird account
Log onto your Bluebird.com account and you should see the Gift cards reflected in your new balance. Click on the Pay Bills button.
Type in whoever your rent checks are payable to in the “Who do you need to pay?” box and it will prompt you to create a new payee. Enter all of the information requested. I actually deposit my rent into my landlord’s bank account each month so I make my landlord the payee then put my address with a C/O my name on the Address 2 line so the check comes to me to deposit.
Click Save and Pay now. On the next screen you will find a place for the amount and a memo. Enter the rent amount and any memo there. Note it will tell you in the upper right corner what date the check will be delivered by which I have found to be accurate.
That’s it! Miles for paying your rent!
Note that this method can be used to pay any bill that you normally have to pay with a check such as electric bills or student loan payments too! Now, open up that Bluebird account and start getting miles! And if you are looking for a great credit card and a 40,000 sign on bonus, then check out the US Airways® Premier World MasterCard®.
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