Fatwallet is a great source. I just paid of my wife's student loans with credit so that I could get some sign up bonuses. I managed to pay of about $3700 and got about $1420 in bonus money.
What lender do you have that allows CC payments? Mine only accepts cash (checking) payments. I could use balance transfer checks but those usually aren't eligible for rewards.
I also want to hear the answer to this question, or the most effective way to do so indirectly. It would be awesome to transfer a manageable amount of my student loans to a 0% APR credit card.
The Credit Card -> Vanilla Card ->Bluebird->Loan payment method doesn't look very effective at the moment. You pay $4 per $500 reload on Vanilla and you pay $2 per $100 added from a debit card on bluebird. So per $1000 that goes through the pipeline, you pay $24, or 2.4%up front. You can only do reloads in $500 amounts in person, and you can only transfer up to $100 per day to Bluebird. In other words, up to $3000/month transferred from loan to card.
Let's say you have a 8.75% APR loan, and you're a bit more conservative than that and transfer $1500 per month this way. Here's the savings over a course of 12 months (keep in mind, you have to pay the money you move back before then and/or use multiple cards, or roll over the balance to another card, likely incurring another fee)
$1500 * 0.024 * 12 = $432 in "credit pipeline" fees
You will transfer $18,000 in that year, but since it's not immediate you still pay some interest on it over the year.
Using
this calculator from Bankrate.com, I calculated that you will pay $842 in interest on money waiting to go through the pipeline. If you do not get the $18,000 transferred and do not make enough direct payments to have a balance below $18,000 by the end of the year, you would pay about $1575 in interest in that year.
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So what are our net savings?
Amount we will pay in interest if we do nothing - Amount we will pay in interest if we do something - credit pipeline fees + credit card cash back (let's say 2% with a card with grocery store benefits (18000 * 0.02 = $360))
$1575 - $842 - $432 + $360 = $661 savings in a year.
Is going to the store to refill your vanilla card every other week, then scheduling the Debit->bluebird transfers, then scheduling the bluebird -> bank transfers, while also keeping an eye on the fees, making sure nothing goes wrong with your pipeline, and the anxiety of having this debt on your credit card worth it? You can do better by transferring the full $3000 and/or if your APR is higher, but personally, I'd rather not bother.