Developing: Evolve Money

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[update 2/6/14: please see my post on Upromise Investments]

Hot on the heels of yesterday's exciting post on the HR Block Emerald Prepaid MasterCard, today's news is about a potentially even more lucrative product: Evolve Money. I first read about this service last night on FlyerTalk and went to bed thinking about the possibilities.

Today I looked into the service in depth and have some pretty exciting preliminary conclusions.

How Evolve Money Works

Evolve Money is a service that allows you to pay your bills online – for free – using a Visa, MasterCard, or Discover debit card, REloadit packs (available at some grocery stores), or a product called "Evolve Pay Bucks."

You can create an account to store your payees, or use the service as a guest and input your bill information each time you pay a bill.

After searching their database of payees, you select the biller you want to pay, enter your account information, then choose your payment method.

That's it. It took me a few seconds to set up an account, add my MasterCard debit card, and make a number of experimental bill payments. I'll keep my readers updated with those results.

What Payees Are Available?

There's good news and bad news on this front.

First, the bad news: as far as I can tell no bank's credit card division is listed as an eligible payee.

The good news is there are a lot of payees that are potentially lucrative. The list is incredibly long (it's free to search, so go check it out for yourself), but here are some highlights I found:

  • Mortgages: Bank of America Mortgage, JP Morgan Chase Mortgage, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, PNC Mortgage, Countrywide Home Loans, etc.;
  • Student Loans: Federal Student Loans - All Servicers, Discover Private Student Loans, Citibank Loan/Private Student Loan/Line of Credit, Acs Educational Services, Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, etc.;
  • Savings Accounts: Utah Educational Savings Plan, TD Ameritrade 529 College Savings Plan, Schwab 529 College Savings Plan, etc.;
  • Insurance Premiums: Blue Cross Blue Shield (every state);
  • Tax Payments: hundreds and hundreds of city and county revenue departments are listed.

Which Debit Cards Work?

I can confirm that the PayPal Business Debit MasterCard does work for bill payments, and these transactions are processed as signature purchases which should earn 1% cash back. My regular readers know what that means: you can load your PayPal account using PayPal My Cash cards purchased with a rewards-earning credit card, then earn 1% cash back liquidating those funds paying bills you wouldn't ordinarily be able to pay with a credit card. You'll be earning your credit card rewards – and a small profit – for transactions that wouldn't otherwise earn rewards.

If you are currently paying a mortgage or student loan using withdrawals from your bank account, take a look at the list of available payees and decide whether you can take advantage of this service instead and earn rewards on those payments.