Evolve Money Review – Is It A Good Option For Manufactured Spending?

This post is part of our manufactured Mondays series, where we post about some of the most popular manufactured spending (MS)  techniques. If you’re new to MS we suggest you read our introductory guide first.

Evolve money is a website that allows you to pay bills online with either a debit card, prepaid card or cash. This might not seem like a manufactured spending opportunity at first glance because you can’t use a credit card directly. Thankfully prepaid Visa & MasterCard cards are counted as debit cards (American Express prepaid cards cannot be used) and thus can be used, making it an excellent way to liquidate prepaid cards that you have from purchasing them from a store with a high category bonus (e.g Staples gift cards using a 5%+ card with a 6% portal bonus).

Here is a few key details about evolve money:

• There is a limit of 4 payments per bill per month, this is on a calendar month cycle
• There is a payment size limit of $999 or whatever the gift card amount is (whichever is lower)
• They make money by offering premium services, such as same day Bill Pays for $1.5, they also make money by selling Evolve Pay Bucks through retailers
• If you’re making multiple payments to the same bill you need to space the payments out into 5 minute intervals otherwise they will fail and your gift card will have a preauthorized payment on it. You’ll need to wait anywhere from 10 days to 2 weeks before this charge falls off, then you can use that prepaid card again. This wait time occurs even if you’re using multiple evolve accounts.
• You can use the other following prepaid cards with evolve money: Reloadit cards, OneVanilla
• No PIN required

List Of Bill Payees

In total Evolve money has a list of over 10,000 companies that you can pay bills with, you cannot currently pay off any credit card bills using this service. You will be able to at some stage, but this will come with a fee and they’ll limit which payment methods you can use. Below is a small section of some of the more popular Bill Payees (you can view the full list by clicking here and continuing as guest).

• Uverse
• Time warner cable
• Verizon

A lot of these companies are just regular utilities and telecommunication providers that already allow you to pay by credit card. The real value is to pay off items such as student loans, rent, insurance companies and your mortgage which cannot usually be paid by credit card. Here are some of those providers:

• BB&T loans
• Discover personal loans
• FedLoan servicing
• Navy Federal CU loans
• Sallie Mae

If you send a mortgage payment make sure the amount you’re sending is applied to the current payment and not the principal. Some mortgage providers will add your payment to the principal if the payment is less than the current payment amount. You can sometimes get around this by sending two payments of $1,000 or less, one on Saturday and the other on Sunday – they should both show up as one payment on the Monday/Tuesday in the eyes of the mortgage company. You might also be able to get around this by creating multiple Evolve money accounts so you can send more than $1,000 in a single day (Evolve has publicly stated that they plan to allow payments over $1,000 for things like mortgages in the future). The following mortgage provides do not accept partial payments for your current mortgage payment:

• Bank of America (although they can combine multiple payments if you call them when all payments are made)
• Chase (will sort the issue out for your once or twice, but aren’t happy about it and may not continue to sort it out)
• Provident funding
• Nationstar Mortgage
• US Bank, doing partial payments will work for awhile but they will warn you that it might get shut down
• Wells Fargo (you can call to get the partial payments to be used for your current mortgage payment, but you’ll need to do this each time which is a hassle). If you make multiple payments that total the exact amount of your mortgage repayment this will work.

The following banks do allow partial payments to be made:

• BB&T
• Ocwen Mortgage

Whilst you cannot pay off credit cards, you are able to pay off some store cards. Do a search to see if any of the store cards you currently have can be paid off using evolve.

If there is a specific payee you want added, you can request this to be added by Evolve Money by sending them an feedback using their online form or send them an e-mail to support [at] evolvemoney.com.

Evolve Money Promo Codes

Ocassionally Evolve money will provide small incentives you use their service. At the moment they don’t have any of these bonuses currently available. When there are two or more bonuses active at once, it seems that they are stackable. Here is a list of previous bonuses:

• save5april: Save $5 on any bill valid from April 7th until April 21st, 2014 at 11:59 pm PDT
• taxday2014: Save $5 on any bill, valid for April 15th only

If you’d like to be notified of future Evolve Money promo codes they suggest that you “Like Us OnFacebook, Follow Us On Twitter  and Google+“, alternatively just join our mailing list and we will let you know about future codes (see the top of the sidebar on the right). We now also have a dedicated section for evolve money promo codes.

F.A.Q’s About Evolve Money

Q: Does evolve do any credit check to open an account with them?

A: No, they do not check your credit to open an account

Q: Do gift cards need to be registered before I use them with Evolve money?

A: No, you don’t need to register your gift cards before using them with Evolve money.

Q: Where can I read on going discussions on Evolve Money?

A: The best source is this flyertalk thread. There is also a shorter thread on Fat Wallet Finance and another on DansDeals.

If you do decide to use Evolve money, you should start with a few small test payments first to make sure everything is working correctly. Make sure you give yourself plenty of time so you don’t have to pay the $1.5 fee for same day payments.

Next week we will be looking at the best places to purchase prepaid Visa & Mastercard cards, make sure you join our rss feed or newsletter to stay in touch with the latest posts from Doctor of Credit. If you have any questions about Evolve money, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.