Evolve Money seem to be hell bent on shutting down any possible use of their service for points & miles enthusiasts. The latest victim is the UFB debit card, which earns 1 American Airline mile for every $2 spent. You used to be able to use this card without any fees, but Evolve Money are now charging a 3% fee to use this card.
I’ve given up trying to use Evolve Money to generate miles, points or cash back. It was fun while it lasted. I’m not entirely sure I understand the point of Evolve Money anymore, the only real advantage is that you can pay all your bills from one website. Personally I just set up automatic payments so this feature isn’t exactly useful.
Hat tip to Lea & Tzvi (special thanks for the picture)
@mile hustler. – but you dont get miles from st for evolve payments, do you?
@Kappy: tried scheduling a payment using UFB for next month (well over the 3 days) and definitely shows there would still be a 3% fee.
@DOC: the Suntrust debit card, for those still grandfathered into the Delta program, is still fee-free for now.
I think you can still make UFB Direct funded payments without fees so long as they are scheduled at least three days out.
See fees here. How about scheduled bill pay? It did not show a fee when I scheduled it. Will it charge me fee when make the payment?
In the past it hasn’t, but that could always change. I would’ve thought you’d easily be able to make a complaint with the CFPB if they did charge you fees though as when you scheduled it was marked as no fee.
Thanks, Will. Hopefully no fee
If Evolve completes the scheduled payments as they were, they would still have no fee.
Last week though I had scheduled payments “fail” and the Evolve error message directed me to call my bank. I called the issuer and they had no record of any attempted transaction(s). The payments were using cards that now Evolve charges a fee on.
Evolve does seem to be finding a way to wind down their service. The only advantage I have left for their service are to use a debit card from a bank that earns no rewards, but by making at least five debit transactions triggers the higher savings interest rate at that bank.
I don’t get Evolve anymore either. Seems pretty useless, even from a non point collecting point of view.
Since when? Mine still shows No Fee.
I don’t quite understand Evolve’s business model. Unless you really need to pay a fee to get your bill pay delivered early, how does Evolve expect to make any money? When they shut down award debit card like this I don’t know why anybody would use Evolve. There is the simplicity factor I suppose but virtually every bank has a bill pay center so a consumer could just use that instead of Evolve.
I think we all here reading this blog and participating in the fora are way to sophisticated and smart to understand a big number of American minds. As someone had pointed out to me in a forum: don’t look at it through your (pink) MS goggles!
No offense but over the last couple of years since we moved stateside we’ve come to realize that many many Americans are quaint, slow thinking and narrow minded. This could partially explain why still thousands or maybe more would use this service in the first place. Who knows, maybe we miles/points addicts have always been a minority of Evolve’s customer base and they just threw us out because we hurt their bottom line and they’re making plenty revenue (wherever that may come from) from the other folks.
“way to sophisticated”….
Oxymoron much?
Even not looking through my MS goggles, Evolve Money makes hardly any sense. It only offers people two things: a central website to manage all of your payments, and the ability to rush payments for a fee.
The central website thing is stupid because virtually every bank has a bill payment center. Which includes credit card companies as payments, making it a better bill pay center in terms of payees available than Evolve since Evolve doesn’t have CC companies as payees.
The ability to rush payments for a fee could be useful in a pinch. But are you seriously going to be able to run a business just based on collecting these rush processing fees? That just doesn’t make any sense.