Paying tax, utility, and insurance bills with Canadian Tire credit cards | Page 6 | Credit card reward programs | Discussion forum

savemoresaveoften said
I would never authorize autopayment on any cc. In fact I wont do authorize any auto payment of any kind whether utilities or cell phone bills etc. My reason is if there is any dispute of any kind, you end up payment the wrong amount first and then try to resolve and get it back.

Paying by pre-authorized debit or auto-payment on a credit card does not remove or diminish your recourse rights, so long as you exercise those rights within the requisite timeframes.

Loonie said
It looks like there is a fee of 2.25% charged by the issuer, presumably the CC.
https://registrar.mcmaster.ca/payment-methods/

I had never heard of this fee before. Why on earth are students being targeted this way?  

It's a fee to cover the cost of the merchant fee charged. Because college and university tuition are all high dollar amounts, they'd end up paying outsized per sale fees relative to smaller sales ticket size retailers, so they often don't accept credit cards.

Canadian Tire has an offering where you can make an online bill payment from your CT credit card, earn rewards points, not pay any interest if fully paid by the due date, and so forth. It's not the same as a merchant purchase.

Cheers,
Doug

Such credit card convenience fees are not actually charged by university. Instead, the 2.25% in this case is collected by another card merchant.

The card merchant charges the credit card the tuition amount plus 2.25%. Merchant then does a bill payment to the university for the tuition amount. Merchant retains the 2.25% as its fee making the bill payment.

It's a workaround for that former no-surcharging restriction in credit card agreements. I've seen municipalities use the workaround for residents who wish to pay their property taxes using their credit card. Paymentus Corporation is one card merchant that offers such services.

savemoresaveoften said
I would never authorize autopayment on any cc. In fact I wont do authorize any auto payment of any kind whether utilities or cell phone bills etc. My reason is if there is any dispute of any kind, you end up payment the wrong amount first and then try to resolve and get it back.

I used to have over draft ability on my checking account. I purposedly told the bank to remove it. This thing if the account was hacked or compromised, its only limited to the funds in the account.  

Why complicate your life? If there is a dispute on the amount of a credit card statement, you can dispute any individual charge and it will typically be placed on hold until it is resolved, reducing the auto-payment amount.

And unless your finances are that tight, resolving an individual charge by any of the auto-payments would typically be a few hundred dollars. And if you are truly in the right, will be credited back.

Also, keep in mind that the way CDN Tire sets up auto-payment for individual charges is completely under your control. It is not your typical and true "auto-payment". You can modify any payment by logging into your online account and make changes/cancellations within seconds.

savemoresaveoften said

I am one of the pioneer in using the CT card for payment when it first came out. I also do not use the their auto payment or post dated feature, for the simple reason that there has been reports of them "missing a payment" since payments are manually processed. They also had the history of "losing all accounts already setup" a few years ago, and I have to set each one up manually again. So I use it manually and I watch it to make sure payment goes thru.

So to me, its "simpler" the way I use them for.  

Because of the possibility of my payments not being made on time by using this service, I only use it where there is bigger bang for my time to monitor it.

I use it for municipale taxes and a large annual payment. Those 3 payments give me well over $100 in CT money. I'll spend 5 minutes of my time to monitor each of those payments, but I won't do it for all in my monthly bills. For the $1 I'd get to pay a utility bill this way, I'd rather the utility company take the payment so I know it's paid.

I've used preauth debits for many, many, many years and never once had a problem.

It's ½% to 4% depending on where the spend is.

Details are at Triangle Credit Cards.

Note that there's no extended warranty coverage on the basic Triangle MasterCard.

Town of Midland now says future tax payments by credit card will incur 2.4% extra "convenience fee" to offset what credit card companies charge them. I assume this will affect payments by Cdn Tire card. Not sure if any other municipalities do the same yet.

Bill said
Town of Midland now says future tax payments by credit card will incur 2.4% extra "convenience fee" to offset what credit card companies charge them. I assume this will affect payments by Cdn Tire card. Not sure if any other municipalities do the same yet.  

It should not, well, depending how one pays their Town of Midland annual property tax bill. If they provide their credit card to the Town of Midland, then yes, they'll pay the 2.4% "convenience fee" levied by Town of Midland (most municipalities simply opt not to accept credit cards; some will refer people to third-party payment platforms like PaySimply, which levy their own, usually a bit lower, fees). If one pays their Town of Midland annual property tax bill with their Canadian Tire Bank credit card via Canadian Tire Bank online banking's online bill payment functionality, then they should pay no fee because Town of Midland sees it as an online bill payment. Most credit card issuers do not offer online bill payment functionality; Canadian Tire Bank does, and happens to pay about 0.04% rewards on such bill payment amounts. Functionally, it's more like a cash advance than a purchase, except there's no fee for it and it should still be subject to the usual interest-fee grace period. It's not a bad deal. 😉

Cheers,
Doug

I'm surprised the Town of Midland was not charging a "convenience fee" for paying property taxes by credit card!

Some municipalities, like Vancouver, don't accept credit cards for paying property taxes. Others have been charging fees.

For example, Toronto has partnered with PayIt. Property tax payments by credit card are charged a fee of 2.35%. Payments by Visa Debit are charged a fee of 1½%.

The prepaid Visas and prepaid Mastercards will be charged the 2.35% fee or refused.

The prepaid cards have interchange comparable to that of credit cards. The card-not-present interchange on a consumer Visa prepaid card is 1.52%. That's more than the 1.40% card-not-present interchange on a regular Visa credit card.

The 1½% or 2.35% is not a surcharge as the card merchant is not the City of Toronto. Instead, the merchant is PayIt who is offering to bill pay, for example, a $1,000 Toronto property tax bill, online for either $1,023.50 charged to a credit card or $1,015 charged to a debit card.