For 2013, I owe money to the tax authorities because I rolled over my old pretax retirement account into my Roth IRA account. I made the decision to roll it over because the funds were growing, my previous employer were invested in many closed mutual funds that I did not have access to, and I did not want it to be too unwieldy for the tax purposes.
Once I learned that once invested into the closed funds, I could rollover “in kind” and continue to invest additional money. I researched a few mutual funds and invested in them with my yearly limit to the Roth.
That being said, I weighed the options of paying the taxes: check, credit, or debit. Originally, I was going to pay with a OneVanilla card, but I asked my bill pay location, about money orders. They stated it was $.99 for a money order paid with cash and a $1 fee if purchasing with a debit card. In total, $1.99 for the money order up to $1000 was my experience. A reader and I have been talking about the money order and bill pay and his experience was up to $2k. So YMMV.
What you now need to consider if the fees as a percent is worth it as paying online with a credit card and among other economic factors. I chose the money order route to test, and am definitely over paying as a fee percentage, but I wanted to report back what is available.
- OV works for MO and would likely work for the bill pay
- Anything over $500 transaction includes extra scrutiny
- MO’s cost $1.99 for debit card
- BP’s cost $3.95
If you put some creative juices into this, you can make money, make low cost points, or make free points.
Photo by Robby Virus
Anybody ever played around with the rewards debit card offered by popular bank? It’s 1 point per $2 in spend, so you’d get 500/1000 points per money order. The problem is you can see what points are redeemable for with the bank, but not how many points they cost. $25 annual fee as well and only available in select areas.
That’s an interesting card that I’ll need to dive into researching some more
Too lazy to buy debit cards. 3% back on fee-free Amex GC plus 1 Starwood point minus 1.79% fees for federal taxes and 2.49% fees for state taxes.
Lazy, so less profitable. Still: profitable.
Still not bad of a haul!