This App Rewards You for Paying Your Bills on Time Like a Grown-up

cropped shot of father and son paying money while waiter holding bill
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When you were a kid, your mom probably gave you an allowance for washing the dishes and sweeping the floor. Now all you get for doing that is a kitchen that’s clean for, like, 15 minutes.

Now that you’re a grown-up, you no longer get rewarded for just doing the things that are expected of you — like, for instance, paying bills on time.

Not until now, anyway. MoneyLion, a free app for managing your personal finances, will reward you for things like paying your bills and monitoring your credit — even just setting up an account in the app.

Much like that childhood allowance, it’s basically bribing you to be good.

You’ll earn points in the app’s rewards program, and you can redeem them for gift cards to more than 15,000 retailers, including places like Walmart, Applebee’s and Amazon.

Credit Card Rewards Without the Scary Interest Rates and Debt

You can connect MoneyLion with all your bank, credit card, student loan and other financial accounts. Based on your income and spending patterns, it offers personalized advice to help you save money, reduce your debt and improve your credit.

So if credit cards aren’t your thing, MoneyLion is like having a rewards credit card without the temptation to overspend. Once you earn 2,500 points, you can redeem them for a $25 gift card (for example to Starbucks, Target, Bass Pro Shops or thousands of other retailers or restaurants).

You can earn points for tons of stuff you do in the app. You’ll get rewards for signing up for a MoneyLion account and taking actions like the following:

  • Connect a bank account: 500
  • Sign up for free credit monitoring: 100
  • Download the mobile app and log in: 100
  • Upload a profile picture: 100
  • Complete your profile: up to 150 points

That’s 950 points just to get started with the app. If you want to take it a step further and work on paying down debts, for example, MoneyLion can help with a loan to consolidate your debt and potentially reduce your interest rates. And it’ll reward you for that, too!

  • Get your first personal loan: 100
  • Make a loan payment on time: 200

You Gotta Pay Your Bills Anyway, Why Not Get Rewarded?

Once you sign up for MoneyLion’s free credit monitoring, it’ll check to see that you’re keeping up on your bills. Every month you pay your bills on tIme, you get another 50 points.

Take all these steps, and you could earn your first $25 in rewards in about five months — and build healthy financial habits along the way.

So, pay your bills on time, and get free gift cards.

Now that you’re a grown-up like the rest of us, this is how you earn your allowance.

Mike Brassfield ([email protected]) is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder. Now that he’s a grown-up, he tries to pay his bills on time.