If you’re not familiar with Evolve Money, we’d recommend reading our in depth post first (you can also read our introduction to manufactured spending). Basically Evolve Money allows you to pay your bills (& mortgage) online with debit cards (this includes gift cards). This is an extremely profitable & popular way of unloading Visa & MasterCard gift cards (American Express cards cannot be used) as there are no fees.
Unfortunately there has been some negative changes made to Evolve Money and some people have been shut down because of it. Here are the changes made:
- Limit of 4 payments per month per biller
This is a system wide limit. This means that if you have an account and your wife also has an account then you can still only make 4 payments to your mortgage (not 8). This limit didn’t used to be in place, which is why people often had multiple accounts to help get their payments to apply to the mortgage payment and not the principal.
You can of course still make 4 payments to your mortgage and then another 1 payment to your electricity bill and then another 1 for your phone bill.
- Payment size is limited to $999 or whatever the gift card size is (whichever is lower)
You can not split a payment across several gift cards. For example, if you have a $200 gift card and a $300 gift card you cannot make a payment for $500. You’ll have to make a transaction of $200 and then another transaction of $300. This will obviously eat away at the number of payments you have per month per biller.
Our thoughts
These changes are pretty frustrating, but not all together surprising. It seems some people have been abusing Evolve Money (I won’t be posting the exploit here as I’d like to see Evolve Money stick around & no I’m not talking about the ability to use a credit card) and this is one of the ways Evolve Money is pushing back.
As long as your mortgage payment is under $2,000 per month, you should still be able to easily pay your mortgage using $500 gift cards. It does mean it’s no longer possible to unload a whole heap of lower value gift cards (e.g $200 gift cards that are purchased from Staples) to pay your mortgage though which is frustrating. For more information on the latest manufactured spending news we recommend reading through our archives found here.
Hat tip to Evolve Money thread on FT
