Earn an additional 1% back with the Fold card
On your mortgage, credit card bills, or any other recurring bill. That could be $50,000 on a $500K mortgage (if they stay in business).
The Fold debit card is an overcomplicated, gamified, casino-esque rewards card. Sadly, I see why they set up this way. If they made the features more straightforward, everyone would just be taking the free money they are offering, and they would lose money.
It also happens to pay out rewards in Bitcoin, which you may or may not appreciate.
Here’s how it works
Fold provides you with a debit card that offers either a flat 1% back, or an opportunity to spin a “rewards wheel” ranging from ~nothing to ~1 BTC (never going to happen). You also have “spin again” tokens depending on your membership plan, balance kept in the account, referrals, and all sorts of other gamified ways to keep you engaged and keep money on the platform.
Altogether, I estimate the expected value of the wheel to be ~1.5% back, capped at ~$25 back per purchase. The expected value is subject to change every month, when they change out the rewards wheel. (And the expected value may be dropping, as they are no longer transparent about the probability of each possible wheel outcome… they also didn’t used to have capped reward amounts, only flat percentages… we’ll see how long there’s any alpha in this strategy.)
Getting 1.5% isn’t a strong enough benefit to replace your daily driver credit card, which should be earning 2% back or more.
However, the beauty of this benefit is that the rewards debit card can be used to pay off the credit card bill where you already earned 2%. Or a mortgage. Or any other recurring bill.
Here’s how:
Add your Fold card to PayPal (instructions)
Sign up for PayPal bill pay
Add your bills (credit card, utilities, mortgage, car loan, anything)
Turn off any auto-payment from your previous payment method (likely a checking account), to ensure you don’t double pay
Start paying bills manually from PayPal bill pay whenever you receive a bill
The downside here is step 4, taking your payments off of autopilot. As PayPal bill pay doesn’t yet offer a fully automated solution, the tradeoff you are making is adding a monthly task (per credit card, mortgage, etc.).
The benefit depends on how much you spend, and how much of that spending is of a type that can be paid through PayPal. Of course, there are also the questions of how much you value your time, how likely are you to forget to pay the bill, etc. For most people who can add a task to a to-do list or a recurring event to their calendar, this should be an easy way to pick up an extra $25-$100 per month during one episode of a random Netflix show. That isn’t too much, but it’s more than enough to pay for that month of Netflix.
My approach
Get the Fold Spin+ card, at a cost of $100/year, which has better rewards and additional free spins each day
Keep $1,000 on the debit card, again earning additional free spins each day
When a bill arrives, move that amount of money from my checking account to the debit card
Pay the bill via PayPal each month (for me, earning ~$35/month)
Move the BTC off Fold and into cold storage whenever it reaches their minimum threshold
If you’re interested in trying it out, use my referral code :)
What does this have to do with Bitcoin?
Nothing, really. This PayPal + rewards debit card strategy would work for any rewards debit card. I just happen to be interested in Bitcoin (see here), and Fold is a company that is trying to spread adoption by making their app “fun” (read: complicated and annoying, but still rewarding for most users at the moment).