Back in May, I covered American Express's new program, in which it lets cardholders pay their mortgages with a credit card. But it was full of downsides, as you can only do it if you pay $395 as part of the closing costs associated with a new mortgage or refinance, and it had a limited number of partner mortgage companies. In other words, you and I couldn't just whip out our wallets and pay our mortgage with our credit cards whenever we wanted.

But a new service called CardIt is aiming to change all that, allowing you to pay your mortgage with a credit card without any strings attached, other than a fee each time you do it, of course.

You just go to their site, enter in your mortgage company info, and make your credit card payment to CardIt, which then turns around and pays your mortgage company. The cost? $19.99, plus 2.49% of the amount of the transaction. For example, if your mortgage payment is $1000, you'd pay an extra $44.89 for the privilege of paying with your credit card.

You'll get your full credit card rewards if you do it, but you'll have to have a pretty strong rewards program to make up for the 3-5% you'll be paying to put the mortgage on your card. So this really isn't a solution for the regularly-paying credit card customer who wants to pile his/her mortgage on a credit card purely for the rewards.

This is really something for use if you absolutely can't make the mortgage payment in a particular month. Of course, I would suggest it's not a smart thing to do. Put your mortgage on your card for just one month and it becomes easy to start carrying that balance and paying even more down the road. Better to call your mortgage company and work out a payment schedule you can live with.

I actually didn't think it was legal to take credit card payments on someone else's behalf, which is essentially what CardIt is doing, because if it was legal I can't understand why this hasn't been done before. The concept itself is a no-brainer. Well, I suppose CardIt has thoroughly checked out the legalities. Either that or they won't be around long. We shall see.