This is worth sharing with anyone that get a per swipe bonus (like I do on my Freedom card, though I think it's going away by the end of 2015 - so would love to hear what other cards get a per swipe bonus).
I recently filed my 2014 taxes, and when the IRS finally sent me the refund it was a few thousand short.
Turns out I had a notice from NY State for overdue taxes, so the IRS sent the money to NYS.
However, I didn't owe NYS anywhere near that amount. I actually paid them a few days late last year, but since they had already generated a notice, they didn't match up my payment with that notice, so it showed an outstanding balance. 20 minutes on the phone with NYS Tax Department had them promising to apply my payment to the "notice", but I would still have some interest due. The money they will be getting from the IRS is more than enough to cover that, but they say it would take them 60 to 90 days to refund me the excess.
I did some experimenting with the NYS Dept of Taxation and Finance, and found that I can pay my liability by credit card. Given that I get 10 points per swipe with my Chase Freedom, I decided to see if I can get a "discount" on my taxes by paying using multiple swipes.
Now the "convenience" fee for using a credit card, is officially 2.25%, however, we all know that rounding can help with that to bring it down slightly. I tried putting in charges of less than a dollar, but it seems like $1.00 is the lowest payment accepted. So I enter a payment of $1.11, convenience fee is $0.02 (which brings it down to 1.8% from the official 2.25%) and watch what happens. Turns out that NYS sends the payment and the fee as two separate charges, so for $1.13 charge, I get 21 UR points. Even if you value the points at only 1 cent, that's an 18.58% discount on my tax bill!
Now comes the obvious question: is it worth all the time required to keep on entering credit card information just to get this discount?
Enter iMacros and Firefox!
iMacros lets you record and playback actions on your web browser. Sometimes the recording needs a little tweaking, but with NYS Dept of Finance there was almost no tweaking at all. Record the action once, and then tell iMacros to play back the loop as many times as you want.
Since applying payments to the bill is not automatic, it seems like as long as there's an outstanding bill, you can overpay (and get refunded 60 to 90 days later).
So there you have it. Manufactured Spend courtesy of Chase Freedom, NYS Dept of Finance, iMacros and Firefox!
Now if anyone can name any other cards that give per swipe bonuses, I am open for suggestions
p.s. The above iMacros technique is also usable to reload Amazon gift card balance 50 cents at a time, though that script required a lot more tweaking and fine tuning.
