Evolve Money is a website which allows you to pay your bills which you would usually pay with your bank account. I have been using it to pay my home mortgage, my car payment, and water and gas. You can even pay student loans, tax payments, and a slew of other bills which you can search for on their website.
You were previously only able to use debit cards (including giftcards with a pin). The giftcard option became difficult as they changed their system, however now they are accepting Discover Card as a method of payment and there is no fee to do so.
Some more good news is that they will be adding the use of Mastercard and Visa cards in 2015. So those bills that you weren’t able to easily earn points on can now earn you points or cash back! Thanks to Dr of Credit, he pointed out that using your Discover Card will earn you 1% cash back, however, it won’t count for the 5% bonus category. Since I have a Discover Card, this option is fantastic to pay my bills and earn some cash in the process.
There are some restrictions to using Evolve Money according to their FAQs. You can only pay any single biller 1 time up to $999 in a given calendar month. Additionally, your total payments cannot exceed $2,999 in a given day, however, you can pay as many billers as you want.
Thanks – very interesting development! So it looks liken this would only work for mortgages under $1000, correct? Any suggestions for alternatives for paying larger ones to generate points?
You could do 999 with Evolve and pay the rest with your bank assuming your mortgage company lets you make multiple payments. A fellow MSer also suggested using Reddit with Evolve which is treated like cash which means that there is still the 1k per day limit but you can make these payments more than once for a biller. I was told Reddit could be bought with a cc at Safeway or Vons but I haven’t tried this yet. Hope this helps!
This is an email that I received from the Evolve Support Team: “Thank you for your email. For Discover cards it must be used to charge the same day.” As of now, same day payments, are free until 12/31/14. However, this means that in the future, it will cost $1.50, for each payment with a Discover card, and possibly the same format for Mastercards and Visas.
Thanks for that helpful comment. I guess they couldn’t sustain business with free cc payments.