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Earning Aeroplan Points on Your Mortgage: Smart Loyalty Play or Expensive Distraction?
A $3,800 monthly mortgage payment in Brampton now throws off 45,600 Aeroplan points a year. That's roughly a round-trip flight to Orlando, deposited straight into your loyalty account every twelve months, just for paying what you'd pay anyway. Chexy's new mortgage rewards program, launched in partnership with Air Canada, is the first in Canada to let homeowners earn 1 Aeroplan point per dollar on what is, for most, their single largest monthly expense.
The mechanics are simple. You link a credit card to Chexy's platform. Chexy charges the card for your mortgage payment, then forwards the funds to your lender via EFT. You earn credit card points on the transaction. Your lender gets paid the same way they always did. The friction cost is the processing fee Chexy charges for running your mortgage through the card network, typically 1.5% to 2.5%, depending on your card type and payment amount.
That fee is where the whole proposition lives or dies.
When the Math Works
Take a household in Mississauga carrying a $580,000 mortgage at 5.2%. Monthly payment: $3,460. Annual points haul at 1 point per dollar: 41,520 Aeroplan points. Market value of those points, redeemed for travel: roughly 1.7 cents each, or about $706. The processing fee at 2%, assuming the top end: $830 annually.
Net position: down $124.
Now run it with the American Express Cobalt card, which earns 5x points on food, drink, and, crucially for some cardholders, certain recurring bill payments. If Chexy codes as eligible (and reports suggest it sometimes does, though AMEX has closed similar loopholes before), that same $3,460 becomes 17,300 points monthly, or 207,600 annually. At 1.7 cents per point: $3,529. Minus the $830 fee: up $2,699.
The gap between those two outcomes is entirely a function of earn rate and coding. The former is a small loss dressed up as convenience. The latter is a material win if you already hold the card and were going to hit the spend threshold anyway.
Where It Falls Apart
Credit utilization matters. Running $3,460 through your card every month, especially if you carry other balances, can spike your utilization ratio and ding your credit score. That's not theoretical. A homeowner in Vancouver who put six months of mortgage payments on a $15,000-limit card and didn't clear the balance immediately saw his score drop 48 points. The points he earned were worth less than the increased interest cost on his next car loan approval.
Platform risk is harder to price but not zero. Chexy is an intermediary. If the EFT clears your lender two days late because of a processing delay, you eat the late fee. Your lender doesn't care that a third party was involved. One missed payment flag on your mortgage file costs more reputationally than a year of Aeroplan points is worth in dollars.
The fee itself only makes sense if your card's earn rate is high enough to clear it. At 1 point per dollar and 2% processing, you're paying 2 cents to buy something worth 1.7 cents. That's not optimization. That's paying a premium for the psychological reward of seeing points accumulate.
The Boundary Case
The program works for three profiles. First: someone holding a high-multiplier card (Cobalt, certain Visa Infinite Privilege cards) who can confirm Chexy codes correctly and who pays the balance in full every cycle. Second: someone whose mortgage payment is low enough that the absolute dollar cost of the fee is trivial even if the math is slightly negative, call it under $1,200 monthly, where a $24 monthly fee feels like rounding error. Third: someone who would otherwise never hit their card's annual spend threshold for a retention bonus or status benefit, and the mortgage spend tips them over.
For everyone else, the fee is a tax on the desire to feel like debt is working for you. It isn't. The lender is being paid. You're being charged for the privilege of routing that payment through a rewards loop.
Mortgage interest in 2026 is deductible for rental properties, not primary residences. The points aren't taxable as income, but they also aren't reducing your taxable interest expense, because you don't have one. The program doesn't change the structural position of mortgage debt. It just turns a portion of it into loyalty currency, at a cost.
If the earn rate clears the fee by 50 basis points or more, take it. If it doesn't, you're buying points retail.
A $3,800 monthly mortgage payment in Brampton now throws off 45,600 Aeroplan points a year. That's roughly a round-trip flight to Orlando, deposited straight into your loyalty account every twelve months, just for paying what you'd pay anyway. Chexy's new mortgage rewards program, launched in partnership with Air Canada, is the first in Canada to let homeowners earn 1 Aeroplan point per dollar on what is, for most, their single largest monthly expense.
The mechanics are simple. You link a credit card to Chexy's platform. Chexy charges the card for your mortgage payment, then forwards the funds to your lender via EFT. You earn credit card points on the transaction. Your lender gets paid the same way they always did. The friction cost is the processing fee Chexy charges for running your mortgage through the card network, typically 1.5% to 2.5%, depending on your card type and payment amount.
That fee is where the whole proposition lives or dies.
When the Math Works
Take a household in Mississauga carrying a $580,000 mortgage at 5.2%. Monthly payment: $3,460. Annual points haul at 1 point per dollar: 41,520 Aeroplan points. Market value of those points, redeemed for travel: roughly 1.7 cents each, or about $706. The processing fee at 2%, assuming the top end: $830 annually.
Net position: down $124.
Now run it with the American Express Cobalt card, which earns 5x points on food, drink, and, crucially for some cardholders, certain recurring bill payments. If Chexy codes as eligible (and reports suggest it sometimes does, though AMEX has closed similar loopholes before), that same $3,460 becomes 17,300 points monthly, or 207,600 annually. At 1.7 cents per point: $3,529. Minus the $830 fee: up $2,699.
The gap between those two outcomes is entirely a function of earn rate and coding. The former is a small loss dressed up as convenience. The latter is a material win if you already hold the card and were going to hit the spend threshold anyway.
Where It Falls Apart
Credit utilization matters. Running $3,460 through your card every month, especially if you carry other balances, can spike your utilization ratio and ding your credit score. That's not theoretical. A homeowner in Vancouver who put six months of mortgage payments on a $15,000-limit card and didn't clear the balance immediately saw his score drop 48 points. The points he earned were worth less than the increased interest cost on his next car loan approval.
Platform risk is harder to price but not zero. Chexy is an intermediary. If the EFT clears your lender two days late because of a processing delay, you eat the late fee. Your lender doesn't care that a third party was involved. One missed payment flag on your mortgage file costs more reputationally than a year of Aeroplan points is worth in dollars.
The fee itself only makes sense if your card's earn rate is high enough to clear it. At 1 point per dollar and 2% processing, you're paying 2 cents to buy something worth 1.7 cents. That's not optimization. That's paying a premium for the psychological reward of seeing points accumulate.
The Boundary Case
The program works for three profiles. First: someone holding a high-multiplier card (Cobalt, certain Visa Infinite Privilege cards) who can confirm Chexy codes correctly and who pays the balance in full every cycle. Second: someone whose mortgage payment is low enough that the absolute dollar cost of the fee is trivial even if the math is slightly negative, call it under $1,200 monthly, where a $24 monthly fee feels like rounding error. Third: someone who would otherwise never hit their card's annual spend threshold for a retention bonus or status benefit, and the mortgage spend tips them over.
For everyone else, the fee is a tax on the desire to feel like debt is working for you. It isn't. The lender is being paid. You're being charged for the privilege of routing that payment through a rewards loop.
Mortgage interest in 2026 is deductible for rental properties, not primary residences. The points aren't taxable as income, but they also aren't reducing your taxable interest expense, because you don't have one. The program doesn't change the structural position of mortgage debt. It just turns a portion of it into loyalty currency, at a cost.
If the earn rate clears the fee by 50 basis points or more, take it. If it doesn't, you're buying points retail.
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