How I accidentally paid taxes with my wife’s Business Platinum card – Frequent Miler

April 14, 2025

One of the great things about running a successful business (often mylar) is that I can pay a lot with taxes. “Great” and “Tax” usually don’t go together, but since it’s possible to pay taxes with a credit card (see guide here), we appreciate the opportunity to spend the road to elite status, or use a card that earns more cash than tax fees, which meets the minimum cost requirements for a new card’s welcome bonus, or earns money. It should be easy…and it’s usually…but I’ve been messed up this time. This is the story…

How I accidentally paid taxes with my wife’s card…

My intention was to pay most of my tax bills with my Bank of America trip business cards. Thanks to the business’s platinum honours, the card has returned to travel and earned 2.62%. But the reward is not actually just travel. You can move your points to your Premium Rewards Card and cash out if necessary. So the card acts as a 2.62% cashback card for me.

Currently, taxes can be paid through two major payment processors at the following fees:

Pay1040:
- Credit Card: 1.75%
- Commercial Credit Card: 2.89%
ACI Payment:
- Credit card: 1.85%
- Corporate Credit Card: 2.95%

In both cases above, if you use a 2.62% Back Bank of America card, you can earn a profit by charging a standard credit card fee (1.75% or 1.85%).

I started with Pay1040 This is because the lowest credit card fee is 1.75%. Unfortunately, Pay1040 treated my card as a commercial card. They wanted to charge 2.89%. no thanks! I tried to pay through PayPal to make my card look like a consumer credit card. That didn’t work. Pay1040 still wanted to charge 2.89%.

Next, I tried to pay for the ACI. In my first attempt, the system is a business card and simply refused to process my payment. That’s fine, our tax guide has the answer: Pay via PayPal. So that was my next attempt…

By choosing to pay with my Bank of America business card Via PayPalshowing that ACI payments were fine with the card, but they only charged 1.85%. perfection. I clicked the button to process my payment and received an error message. The payment was not passed. The payment amount was very close to the credit available on my card, so I thought maybe I had exceeded the limit.

I tried again with a little less tax. This time I got a text message from Bank of America saying that my payment was denied and I asked if I used my card with that amount. I replied “Yes,” but said it would reflect the price. Are you okay…

After clearing the fraud alert, I tried to bill again. This time there was no message from Bank of America and although ACI payments said the purchase was successful, I received texts from three other banks saying the fees were denied. whaaaat!!!? It took a beat to figure out what had happened. PayPal has clearly decided on its own initiative to march on PayPal wallet credit cards, and charged each until the fees passed. It was my wife’s business platinum card that accepted it. And the card that accepted the 1.85% fee was my Hilton Surge Card.

Next time: I’ll complete the Paypal wallet first!

Over time, I added credit cards to my PayPal wallet for random reasons at the time. Now I need to clear them all, especially before purchasing any more through PayPal! If the card you are charging refuses to purchase, I would like to know about it. Those fees don’t want to go to other cards!

It may have gotten worse

I had a lot of cards in my PayPal wallet so I only got one point per dollar from this spend, but instead I got 1.5 times. The Business Platinum Card earned 1.5 points per dollar on purchases over $5,000, and was easily qualified for tax payments. At a 1.85% price, that was it Purchase membership reward points for about 1.2 cents each. We’ve already been washed away with membership reward points so that’s not a price that gets in the way for me to pay, but I’m not too upset about it either.

Even the fact that a 1.85% fee was charged more than my Hilton was no longer a problem. This year I would like to complete a $15,000 spend on that card this year to win a free night certificate. This brought me a little closer to that goal.