iPayMy is offering 250 free rental payments for September

I wrote about iPayMy a while back, a service that lets you pay a small additional fee (see below) to use your credit card to make rental payments to your landlord. This allows you to earn rewards points when paying your rent, and your landlord does not need to be registered with iPayMy for you to do so.

iPayMy is currently offering a promotion where they’re waiving the first month service fee for rent payments made before 30th September. To take advantage of this, you can sign up with the promo code here (Disclosure: I do not earn anything from sign ups through this link). This promotion applies both to existing and new users of iPayMy services.

This discount applies to rental payments of $4,000 and below. The standard service fee (see below) applies to the portion of rental above $4,000. The discount is only available to a maximum of 250 users per month, but when you are at the checkout process to finalise your payment you can enter the code and if the limit has been reached you will get an error message. Therefore you will know beforehand whether or not you qualify.

More interestingly, however, iPayMy has also cut the service fee from a tiered 2.75-2.95% structure to a flat 2.6%.

I suspect this is because of the impending launch of CardUp, another SG-based startup that will let you use your credit card to pay rent, condo fees, insurance, tuition fees and taxes (at 2.6%, which was lower than iPayMy’s 2.75-2.95% brackets). That service has not gone live yet but will be interesting to see what happens when it does.

More avenues to use your credit cards are always a good thing, and I know that the margins in this business must be very tiny, but hopefully the presence of competition will get both parties to keep fees lower and offer better promotions.

So now that the fee is 2.6%, how do the numbers tally up?

Crunching the numbers with the reduced 2.6% figure

Scenario 1: Use HSBC Advance/ DBS Woman’s World Card @ 4 miles per $1

Monthly rent= $2,000
Fees per month=$52
Miles earned=8,000
Cost per mile= 0.65 cents

That’s a heck of a good price to generate some additional miles, if you ask me. Of course once you exceed $2,000 your cost per mile dramatically increases for DBS Woman’s World because you’re only earning 0.4 miles per the $2,001 dollar and upwards. I understand that iPayMy’s interface allows for partial payment and you can use multiple cards to finance the total rental amount.

If you want to use the aforementioned promo code then keep in mind that it is limited to single use only, so if you break up your rent payment into 2 portions then make sure you make the bigger payment first to get the full discount.

The last time I wrote about this I got a lot of questions about “does this count as online spend for HSBC Advance/DBS Woman’s/UOB Pref Platinum Visa/ Citibank Rewards?

Since then, iPayMy has confirmed that holders of the HSBC Advance and DBS Woman’s card have successfully received 10X points on payments to iPayMy.

Scenario 2:  Use UOB PRVI Miles/ANZ Travel Card @ 1.4 miles per $1

Monthly rent= $2,000
Fees per month=$52
Miles earned=2,800
Cost per mile= 1.86 cents

A lot less attractive, and another reason why you really need to get onboard with the specialised spending cards if you want to earn big miles.

A reminder on how much it costs to generate miles through credit card annual fees

What do I think? It doesn’t hurt to give it a try, if only for the first month to get some miles you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get. After that, whether or not you feel it’s worth it to buy miles at 0.65 cents each is your call, but it does seem like a good deal to me. At 1.86 cents the deal is much worse, so this only makes sense if you’re able to get the online spend bonus that certain cards offer.