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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

Ya, I've seen these. It seems like the fee would likely be more than the value of the reward making it a losing proposition? Just wondering if the OP found a better way.

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The land lord I use allows paying with plastic. There is a ~2% fee. It's better than a wash financially, but just barely. But it's net win for me even when it's a wash because I don't have to worry about mailing a check every month.

FWIW in months when I buy expensive plane tickets or make reimbursed purchases I skip paying rent with the CC.

If you just don't want to mail a check every month, you don't need to go as far as a credit card and paying a 2% fee. Your bank should have a bill-pay feature, and they will cut a check and mail it on your behalf. Usually this is a completely free service and can be done on an automatic schedule.

These services are routinely awful and incompetent, however. Also, you're relying on the postal service actually delivering the mail, which is often a dicey proposition.

Bank transfers really ought to be easier to do than they are.

I helped a landlord I was working with on other projects set up a basic Stripe form on the website for one of their properties. No subscriptions or automated payments, you can just go to their site and send them money via credit/debit card.

They eat the couple percent in transaction fees. In return, almost all of their tenants now pay online and instead of the property manager chasing people down for money, everyone generally pays on time (or, in a number of cases, early).

Depending on your priorities, "not having to chase people down for money every month" might be worth paying the $500/mo.

I haven't mailed a rent check in quite some time, my old property management company used paylease to accept online rent payments ($2 fee to pay with ACH, but at least I didn't have to mail a check). My current rental I just pay the property owner directly through Wells Fargo SurePay to her Chase account, works great and no fees for either of us (which makes for a happy me not having to mail a check, and a happy property owner who doesn't have to lose a cent of her rent just to accept payment).

I do not miss mailing checks in, and I do not wish to ever do it again.

It pretty much has to be, by definition, otherwise either the service or the card company would be losing money. It generally only works out if there's a loss leader that you're taking advantage of, e.g. many card companies offer occasional rewards at a loss to encourage people to use the card more in the long term.

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