The company I work for has a one off GST bill of $2 million and a one off stamp duty bill of $500,000. The bills are due to be paid by 21 December.
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The advice of high point earners would very much be appreciated.
While I'm not in cove's league, I
have paid quite a lot of tax on my Select card over the past 9 months. Certainly more than most.
A bunch of random thoughts and suggestions that may or may not be helpful, in no particular order - all pertain to Citi, not WOW, unless otherwise stated:
- is your boss definitely willing to start reimbursing you as soon as you start paying, even if that's now? That obviously is to his detriment, and will be essential to make this work, unless you have a
very large bank balance. I assume you've thought of that and cleared that with him though.
- good to see you're trying to spread the bill around a few cards - I'm not sure the WOW EDR card was the best choice though. There have been isolated reports of them being cancelled for people putting business and/or ATO charges through, and your spending pattern is going to stand out like a sore thumb. You may be fine, but be aware of the risk - and possibly consider signing up for two of the other uncapped 1 QFF point per $1 Visa/Mastercards ASAP instead.
- I personally think you won't have any issue doing this with the Select cards despite the huge amount of money flowing through a new card, but it would still be sensible to take a few precautions. Spreading some of the spend to other cards would be good risk mitigation, as per above, and some additional suggestions are below.
- while I personally think mixing your ATO spend in amongst lots of other, normal, transactions is unlikely to make any difference, it can't hurt - so start using your Select cards for
everything ASAP.
- one of the benefits of Select (and CitiRewards in general) is being able to "warehouse" your points until you need to transfer them to an airline partner (so you don't run afoul of FF programs with points expiries - i.e. SQ), I would probably look to move as many as possible out into airline programs ASAP as it would make it somewhat harder for them to be taken back by Citi if something goes awry. Obviously be aware of points expiry in some programs though, and don't transfer out more than you think you can use within the expiry period!
- when you start paying these bills, you
will get calls from the Citi fraud department, so be prepared for them. In the early days I received a couple of calls - I don't think they ever declined a transaction with the ATO, the calls were a little later to double-check they were genuine. If the person who calls mentions no points for ATO, just tell them its a personal bill or suits you cashflow to pay despite no points, or similar. In my case, I haven't had any calls after the first month or two.
- re pre-loading the card, I personally have had my Select card more than $100,000 in credit on a couple of occasions and have always received full points. However, the T&Cs state you don't get points if your card is more than $10,000 in credit, so it might be
prudent to stick by this - your "risk" of not getting points is greater than mine (given the size and one-off nature of your tax payment - it wouldn't be a big deal for me if they started clamping down on this suddenly and a missed some points on a couple of transaction before I realised). Sticking to the no more than $10,000-in-credit may help keep you off Citi's radar too.
- be aware that BPAY (to load / reload the cards) is overnight, and the cut-off is, I believe, 4pm AEST / ADST. Also make sure you've setup a high enough BPAY limit with your bank to allow the sort of loads / reloads you want to do, as most (all?) banks enforce a fairly low limit. In my bank's case the normal max is, IIRC, $25k, but I was able to convince them to increase it to $250k.
- someone else mentioned the CPF (surcharge) being deductible - I am not an accountant but I don't see how it would be in your case, unless possibly if your employer "paid" it (i.e. paid you back for it), in which case it
may be deductible for them. Obviously it would cost them money though, so probably not willing to do it this way.
- be aware that doing this may carry some future tax "risks" for you and your wife - I can't quantify them though, and I don't think anyone here has established this 100%.
Other than that... good luck, and enjoy your points!
