[Update 4/17/2015 – The original post was written on January 1, 2015. Evolve is now charging a 3% fee for using gift cards on their site. Therefore, this post and really Evolve is irrelevant now; I’m just keeping it here for posterity sake.]
People have a love/hate relationship with Evolve. It’s a long story, but Evolve lets you pay certain bills with gift cards. I use this to pay my utilities bill, car payment, part of my mortgage, and department credit cards. Let’s break this down and I’ll show you how to rack up some easy points:
- Electricity & gas bill – This is around $100-$150 a month. I usually send a $500 gift card at a time, so I prepay for 3+ months’ worth of bills. This is about 2,000 miles per year.
- Water bill – This is separate from electricity and gas that I also pay with Evolve. I don’t know how much the annual bill is.
- Car payment – About 1,000 miles a year, but of course this depends on if you have a car payment
- Mortgage – Evolve only lets you send 1 payment per payee per month, and the max payment is $999. Since my mortgage is over that, I send $999 with Evolve and the rest via Bluebird/Serve. Make sure your mortgage company is okay with you sending 2 payments (sometimes, they may not apply the payments to your ‘monthly payment’ and may deduct it from your principal.) So how do I send $999? Well, I use an intermediary debit card called Chime, which I reload at Rite Aid drug stores using a credit card (this is YMMV aka depends on the cashier/store). So this is 12,000 miles a year. This will be in a later post.
- Comcast bill – I pay this direct using my Chase Ink for 5X, so better to do that than a gift card
- Cell Service bill – Chase Ink for 5X again.
So why did I title my post 6,000 miles a year? Because what I haven’t mentioned yet is that you can pay your department store credit cards using Evolve! I’m pretty sure everyone has at one point in time applied for a department store credit card like Macy’s or Banana Republic. Anyway, I started to send $500 payments via Evolve using a gift card to my Kohl’s department store card as well as Macy’s department store card. Kohl’s sent me an overpayment refund check after 3 months. Macy’s however took nearly 6 months to send me my overpayment refund check. I’m not sure if it’s because the end of year reconciliation or if it does take 6 months of showing a negative balance before they cut you a check. Either way, they finally sent me a fat check for $4,500 (some months I sent $999). PLEASE NOTE THAT THE CREDIT CARD ISSUER MAY CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNT IF YOU DO THIS!!! Banks don’t really like you overpaying your credit card and holding a credit balance every month (without any purchases), so only do it if you don’t care if they close your department credit card. In my case, I don’t really care if Macy’s closes my card. I also dug out my old Banana Republic card but realized it was closed due to inactivity. Oh well. Maybe I’ll open some new department store credit cards next year so I can manufacture more points this way.