Three months ago I wrote about a great way to pay your bills via gift card.
Buy gift cards, earn bonus miles, and turn them back into cash by using them to pay bills. Read the post if you haven’t already, and then come back.
The major downside is the limited number of vendors you can do this with via the method I discussed.
Yesterday Million Mile Secrets wrote that you didn’t need to buy gift cards first, because the service — Evolve Money — would actually take credit cards.
That they said it needed to be a debit card (and many gift cards work), but that if you entered a credit card number into the site instead of a debit card it would work.
Lots of alarm bells went off for lots of people! Exciting, right?
Well PointChaser explained why this isn’t as exciting as it first appeared. And the truth is that the value proposition in using Evolve Money is still liquidating gift cards.
Quite simply, the set of bills you can pay is quite limited. Most that you can pay with Evolve Money — like utility bills — you can usually pay online on those providers’ websites directly now. And you may even be able to earn category bonuses with your credit card when you do it. In other words, you’re better off paying with a credit card directly rather than going through this Evolve Money (likely unintended) backdoor if you’re going to use a credit card. But liquidating gift cards is still a valuable tool here.
There are some bills you can pay through Evolve Money that you can’t pay directly with a credit card at least at any reasonable fee — like some mortgages.
If your mortgage servicing company is on the list, you might pay via Evolve Money with a credit card saving the hassle of using multiple gift cards and saving the fee for buying those gift cards.
But that’s still a fairly limited improvement, not something revolutionary.
Read the post and understand this method before you use it, but it’s a useful site indeed to add to your repertoire if you haven’t already.
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will paying with credit card be a cash payment on credit card of merchandise payment? I just don’t want to get hit with huge fees if I use credit card
Is there anyway to see the list of mortgage companies without signing up?
Generally it will code as a purchase, though I always remain wary of Citibank cards in this regard.
looks like there is a daily limit of $1,000. So it will take three payments, one a day to pay your mortgage?
DJP_707: I have Evolve and can check it for you.
I note the $1000/day limit in the linked post.
If the payment is more than 1000 and my company does not split payments, what can I do?
Evolve money has a guest access mode, where you can search for the payee you care about before signing up.
I’ve read where some people have had trouble with payments posting a principal payments or something using Evolve. It seems like a good idea for mortgage payments to me. That is some easy spend that could add up over a year.
FrequentMiler has some posts with good information for those who want to make their regular monthly mortgage payments with Evolve Money. It’s tricky and will depend on your mortgage processor whether it will work. Make sure to read the comments of those posts too. Some have been told by their processor to stop doing split payments because they have to manually code them, and it’s expensive for them.
I’ve made extra principal payments through it, and it’s worked fine so far. If I make an extra payment from Bluebird and an extra one from Evolve on the same day, the BB one accounts posts to my account 1 day after the stated date, and Evolve posted 1 day after the BB payment.
I wonder how many CC payments it’ll take before Evolve closes an account for abuse.
To be clear, I’ve only used Evolve to liquidate gift cards. I have not, and will most likely not ever, use a CC directly.
I use Evolve for both my HOA, and one of my utility payments. Both of them will take a direct cc payment, but they add cc “processing” fees of around $10. With Evolve it’s free. Those two payments alone saves me $240 dollars a year. I’ve been using VGCs so far, I haven’t tried using a cc thru Evolve yet.
For Mortgage payments, I’ve read that if you make a $1K payment on Sat, and another one on Sun, they post together as $2K on Mon. Although I’m not sure, you can probably make one more payment after banking hours on Fri as well, and get a combined $3K payment.
I tried using a credit card and it gave me the message that my card was not a debit card.
How do you make $1,000 payment with GC that are $500. do you need to make 2 payments or can you combine 2x$500 GC to make $1,000 payment?