The End of Using Gift Cards to Pay Mortgages

by Gary Leff

Evolve Money has been one of the easiest ways to earn miles at little cost.

It’s a bill pay service that at one time even took credit cards, but in general has been useful for using gift cards to pay big bills like mortgages.

In June they began limiting payments to a single vendor to four per month. That was still useful, though not quite as leveragable.

Now it seems they’re only allowing one payment per month per payee. Chandler W. tweeted me about this, Tom S. emailed. And I got the sad email as well.

Dear Evolve Money Customer,

Due to changes in our risk and regulatory compliance policies, Evolve Money will be implementing a limit of one payment per biller account per month. This change takes effect September 1, 2014. There are no limits on the number of cash payments made with a Reloadit pack or Evolve Pay Bucks.

We realize that some of our users have taken advantage of the multiple payments per month to pay off larger expenses such as mortgages. We are currently working on ways to improve the bill paying experience for you and expect to announce details soon.

The Bill Payment Transaction Limits section of our End User License Agreement has been updated to reflect this change. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please feel free to contact us at support@evolvemoney.com with any questions.

Sincerely,
The Evolve Money Team

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  2. RIP Evolve — got the sad e-mail as well. Gone are the days of 25,000 UR points/month for just paying mortgage, car, etc.

  5. Dear Chase… Please re-instate the autopay from my bank account. Thanks! Sincerely…. A former Evolve Money customer.

  7. @Juan – 25k UR a month?? Unless you were buying $200 gcs at od/om at $7 a pop (for 5x) and using those, how in the world were you generating that volume? Or is your mortgage 10x what mine is and you were using a cc with evolve ☺

  8. This makes it really difficult to clear the balance on gift cards, since bills don’t come out to round numbers. Two payments per biller account per month would be fine still, one payment makes Evolve useless.

  9. I use to earn 1-3 Alaska air miles, 1 spg point, and one mariott point per $1(plus fees) to get visa gift card and pay mortgage. This is a loss.

  10. Too bad. Given their posts on FT it certainly seemed like they WANTED the traffic they were getting from the MS crowd, and ACTIVELY WORKED to support customers using Gift Cards. Seemed like it wouldn’t end so quick.

    I’m not clear why anybody continues to use this service. I can pay all of my utility bills online with a credit card already. I suppose some student loans might still work, but otherwise…

    Oh well. ““I don’t want to die without any scars.”

  11. Sadly my electric and water bills are not payable with a credit card, so Evolve still comes in handy for those two bills. But not much else. While it’s not generating a ton of miles, it is a few extra I would not get without them.

  12. I cannot use a card to pay utility bills- i also use it to pay down a credit line against my house that will not take a card for repayment.
    So this is stillscalable in a small way monthly- every mile/point counts.

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