Discover Card Money Messenger Review

I had been holding off on promoting Discover Card’s new Money Messenger system, powered by Paypal, only because it was not a feature in our accounts. However, last week when I logged in, I noticed it is now an available option on all of our accounts, and even though the rewards are minimal, this will be a nice feature for rewards and to help meet our tiered reward spend.

As I talked about in my previous discussion, “What is in My Wallet,” we are big fans of using Discover Card. For both my wife and I, Discover Card is our go-to card each month. I carry both a Discover More card, which I have held since 1997, and a Discover Miles card since 2008. My wife carries only a Discover Miles card from 2008.

I was delighted when I logged into my Discover More card account last week and saw that the new Money Messenger service is now an option. Likewise, it was now an option on both of our Discover Miles cards. How the program works is you need to be invited by Discover Card, and Discover somehow determines what your daily and monthly send limits are, but I have no idea how they determine them. All three of our Discover Card limits were $200 daily, $500 monthly max for a total of $600 daily; $1,500 monthly max. So overall, relatively low and nothing impressive. I may try calling to see if I can have them increased.

After logging into your account, there is a “Send Money” tab located at the top of the page that will take you through the process. You then enter in the name, email or mobile phone number, the amount you wish to send, mark the payment as Friends and Family field, as well as any notes. It is that easy. See my screen print below…

So why is this good and worth writing about? First, there are no fees associated with sending or receiving payments via Discover Card so long as you mark the payment as Friends and Family. You will not incur any interest so long as you pay your balance in full each month. Interest will be charged based on your purchase APR if you do not pay off the balance each month.

The second major value to this program is you earn rewards by using the program. So assuming we have already met our $3,000 spend for the year on the Discover More card to earn 1% cash back, this will in essence pay us $5 each month ($500 * 1%) to use the program. Both our Discover Miles cards will earn us 500 miles each (1,000 miles total for each month).

The Winning Screenshot…

So with a little bit of effort, we will come out ahead each month using this program. We will see how long this program sticks around.

Update: I tried out the Money Messenger program over the weekend. I started sending payments to one of my various Paypal accounts, maxing out my daily allowance Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Once I hit my monthly max ($1,500) on all three of our cards on Sunday, I transferred the money out of our Paypal account and to the bank. The most surprising thing was how fast the money showed up in our account, as it was there already this morning (less than 1 day later considering Sunday is not a business day).

Now as soon as my monthly limit is up, I will rinse and repeat.