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1390

I hesitate to ask… but should we discuss Bilt 2.0 here? Buckle up for the most confusing system I’ve ever seen in 25 years of being in this game.

In simplest terms, they have three new cards:

  • Blue
    • 1x on everything
    • 4% back in “Bilt Cash”
    • $0 AF
  • Obsidian
    • 3x on choice of dining or groceries (groceries specifically has a $25k/yr cap)
    • 2x on travel
    • 1x on everything else
    • 4% back in Bilt cash, $50 semi-annual hotel credits.
    • $95 AF, $50 AU fee
  • Palladium
    • 2x on evertyhing
    • 4% back in Bilt cash, $200 semi-annual hotel credits.
    • $200 annual Bilt cash credit
    • Priority Pass
    • $495 AF, $95 AU fee (who also gets a priority pass)

There are also SUBs but I won’t get into those because that’s not the interesting thing. The Bilt Cash is the thing worthy of discussion.

Bilt cash can be used one of two ways:

  • You can spend it to earn Bilt points by paying your mortgage or rent through Bilt. They give you a routing and virtual account number that, when drawn on, will pull money from a linked bank account. To get 1x on your entire rent or mortgage, you must pay a fee of 3% of your total mortgage or rent. Bilt Cash (or actual cash) can be used to pay this fee. You can optionally earn less than 1x if you just want to spend whatever Bilt Cash you have, at which point you’ll earn some proportional number of points to the amount of Bilt cash you would have normally needed.

    E.g.: To earn 1x on $1k in rent, you must pay a 3% fee or $30. You can use Bilt Cash to pay this fee. Or, you can pay any combination of actual cash and Bilt Cash to get the full 1x. Or, let’s say you have $15 in Bilt Cash - you could spend all of that and choose to earn .5x points back on your mortgage.

  • OR, you can use Bilt Cash to purchase coupons for use in their ecosystem. The most interesting things to me here looked like $100 Bilt Cash for a $100 hotel travel portal credit, $200 Bilt Cash to increase all your multipliers on spend above by 1x up to $5k in spend (so palladium for instance becomes 3x on everything), or $10 at Walgreens.

Confused yet? Well, there’s yet another option. You can forego the Bilt Cash stuff and just earn mortgage or rent rewards according to this formula. Instead of the above you can earn:

  • Points on Housing Minimum everyday spend as a % of monthly rent / mortgage (Example of $2,000 rent)
    0.5x points Spend at least 25% of monthly rent ($500)
    0.75x points Spend at least 50% of monthly rent ($1,000)
    1x points Spend at least 75% of monthly rent ($1,500)
    1.25x points Spend the same or more as your monthly rent ($2,000

I did apply for the palladium and was approved. My primary reasons for going down this rabbit hole are (a) I’m in the PNW so Alaska points (which transfer 1:1 from Bilt) are valuable to me, (b) I’m a Hyatt Globalist and they also transfer 1:1 from Bilt, and (c) I have a lot of non-category spend that could benefit from 2x Hyatt or Alaska.

If anyone can explain this better than I can, I’m all ears… I think for most folks it is a pass unless you place high value on their specific transfer partners.

1391

Wow Thanks for the outline. That’s some confusing system.

It feels like the reward system is intentionally made more complex to prevent optimal use unless one finds a niche use for their spending and for using Bilt Cash. At least for me, I couldn’t find a valid reason to deal with the complexity for potentially very incrementally better rewards than other offerings.

1392

It looks like if you spend enough at Bilt partner vendors, it’s a 4% cash back card + 1 point per dollar. So effectively a 5-6% cash back card depending on how you value the points. I don’t spend enough on restaurants, travel or boutique fitness for the math to work out for me but for some people, it could be a really good option. I don’t see any way the math works out “buying” the mortgage payment points though. I’m not sure why it’s even an option.

1393

I didn’t even see this, but… this way $200 BiltCash (BC) would yield at most 5000 BiltPoints (BP), right? With a housing payment, $200 BC yields 6666 BP. The option to forego BC is worth even more at the 25% of rent/mortgage mark (charge $5000 on card + $20000 housing = get 10000 BP, which is 2x of $5000).

In other words: the “increase multipliers” only gives 1x, while:

  • forego BC at 100% mark yields 1.25x
  • regular BC+housing or forego BC at the 75% mark yields 1.33x
  • forego at 50% yields 1.5x
  • forego at 25% yields 2x.

The travel portal hotel credit might be good, but I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the travel portal.

1394

Absolutely correct. It does, however, give higher spenders (relative to monthly mortgage or rent) an option to liquidate Bilt Cash rather than just let it expire at the end of the year. I think that’s the reasoning behind this, although I agree, it is odd they wouldn’t give you the mortgage/rent rate given that they make hay about rewards on these payments being uncapped.

I suspect for me personally, the travel portal credit will be a 2x/yr thing to use up the semi-annual hotel credit. If I can additionally apply $100 of Bilt Cash to it, great. I assume this includes the “Home away from home” properties, which are boutique/luxury hotels booked through a Virtuoso travel agent. I would trust those a lot more than the regular portal.

Which, while we are on the topic - I find it so odd that they charge lower tier cardholders for access to Home Away from Home. Virtuoso is free - sites like Classic Travel will be happy to do one-off bookings for you without any travel agency sales pitch. Given they surely collect a commission on these sales, I don’t know why they wouldn’t want to encourage anyone and everyone to use this.

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1395

I suppose, but it’s almost like you have to plan all of your spend in advance. How does switching between options 1 (with 4% Bilt Cash) and 2 (forego BC) work? I assumed you’d have to make this choice when you sign up or would be somehow limited to once a year or something. Is it so flexible that you can decide at any time how to redeem?

1396

I think you can switch month-to-month from what they said. And yes, you can decide how you want to redeem your Bilt Cash at the time of redemption, none of that has to be done in advance.

1397

Alright I thought it was a good time for an update, ten days into cardmembership with Bilt. I have the palladium card. On the whole I am surprisingly pleased with it, with a few caveats.

I booked a 2 night stay through the travel portal and spent $100 in Bilt Cash + $200 of the annual hotel credit. It booked as a direct Hyatt booking using Virtuoso and will qualify for things like elite night credit and points earning. I was able to apply a suite upgrade award to the reservation. Pricing was identical to Hyatt’s standard rate. I was able to message the Virtuoso travel agent directly using Bilt and got a couple requests taken care of. I was surprisingly happy with all of this, especially compared to other credit card travel portals.

I paid my March mortgage payment a bit early to account for Bilt’s signature bugs and quirks that were inevitably going to delay things. I used their “push” method which is essentially a Bilt-authored wrapper over Mastercard’s bill payer system. I picked my mortgage servicer in the Bilt UI, applied Bilt Cash to earn points, chose my bank account to draw from, and submitted the payment. Money was drafted from my account the next day, but it took another 4 days to arrive at my servicer. Once it did arrive, it was credited properly. I received points the next business day. I expected the initial hiccups and given it all worked out in the end, I would say they met my expectations. I expect better in April though.

I was also able to pass through another ACH bill for my water utility using their virtual routing and account numbers, and correctly received points for this payment. This payment method encountered zero issues.

Bilt Cash has had some diamonds in the rough for me. The $150 Blacklane credit was a nice surprise - I need to get a ride back from the airport next month and plan to use it when it goes live. Lyft usually charges around $100 between my house and SEA, Blacklane wants $160. I might not be getting the full $150 of value out of the credit versus a Lyft ride, but it’s pretty darn close considering the Blacklane car represents an upgraded experience over the game at the airport of securing a Lyft.

There are just a lot of things broken with their servicing platform. If you apply points accelerator to your account, your AU’s charges do not receive the extra 1x back. If you get a refund for a purchase that had points accelerator applied, they don’t claw back the extra 1x. They don’t show any foreign currency conversions in transaction detail. It’s also worth mentioning that Cardless customer service is truly awful if you believe the reports on DoC, Reddit, and elsewhere.

If you’re willing to put up with initial growing pains and bugs - say, you like beta testing things, I think this is a very good card for people that do not chase SUBs. If you have little tolerance for that kind of thing… I would steer clear. I would recommend it in the right situation.

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1398

With the BofA nerf coming soon (? May+6 months=November ?), Bilt just became a little more valuable for me :slight_smile:

1399

That thought crossed my mind as well. I am not a huge BoA fan for various reasons, but I would say they have the strongest catch-all card for many people in the game. Under the new structure, I think Bilt beats them assuming you are willing to go through the gymnastics of maximizing your return.

1400

Are you referring to the preferred rewards rebranding?

1401
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1402

Thanks.

1403

Looks like I’m good until the end of 2027 :sweat_smile:. Might even get another CCR before the changes take effect in May.

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1404

What about Bilt is valuable? I thought everyone was complaining that these new Bilt cards are a huge nerf compared to the Wellls Fargo Bilt?

1405

I never had and still do not have Bilt, I only read about it as a mental exercise, so this is my understanding.

Bilt 1.0:

  1. Allowed one to earn 1 point per dollar of rent paid without having to use the card for anything else.
  2. The rent would be “charged” to the credit card with no fees.
  3. Was issued by Wells Fargo.

They were just giving away thousands of points for free every month.

Bilt 2.x now includes rent and mortgage, so just call it “housing”:

  1. Requires you to charge a certain percentage of housing if you want to earn points on housing. In the simplest scenario, you must charge 75% of housing in order to earn 1 point per dollar of housing. So if you housing is $2K/mo, you must charge $1500 worth of other expenses, otherwise you would either earn less than 1 pt/$ or would have to pay a partial fee when paying for housing.
  2. Housing is no longer charged to the credit card, it is withdrawn directly from a checking account. This is good for people with low credit lines, but bad for everyone else who wanted to take advantage of free float for ~1-2 months.
  3. Is issued by Cardless with practically no customer service.

This is what people are complaining about, the “nerf” - no free points, no float, no CS.

If you look at the new offers with no prior baggage, and you can match your charges and your housing payment(s) to their new rules, you can earn between 2.33 (Flexible Cash on Blue) and 4 (Housing-only rewards on Palladium at 25% of housing) points per dollar charged to the card. Given their transfer partners, each point can be easily valued at 1.5-2 cents. And that is what’s valuable.

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1406

This is the key thing that makes Bilt valuable. They have partners that cross all the major alliances, including the usual suspects like British Airways, Air France, and Air Canada. But they also have high value, unique partners like Hyatt and Alaska that are typically only available with their single cobranded issuer. The fact that I can accumulate points in a single currency that gives me that kind of flexibility and high value is very unique. And that I can do it at 3x+ per dollar rates? Crazy. No need to decide whether to put something on Chase or AMEX - with Bilt, odds are good that you will be able to transfer points over to purchase an award you discover.

All that said, the launch has been a train wreck and I expect there to be additional fallout once statements close and customers attempt to make payments on their cards. I submitted a test payment last night so we’ll see what happens with that. I have international travel due to start Wednesday so there’s another potential hiccup. Needless to say the full stable of Chase and AMEX cards are coming along for the ride just in case Cardless decides someone stole my physical card in the US and took it for a joyride in New Zealand…

1407

The 2.33x or 4x points per dollar spent is for the non-rent/mortgage spend only right? That doesn’t scale with spend very well btw. If you spend 100% of rent/mortgage, it’s only 3.25x and drops even further as you go past 100%.

Also I think the calculation does not count the 3% fee for paying rent/mortgage via Bilt. So for the hypothetical $2k rent and $500 non-rent spend, with Palladium card, you’d get 2k points at the cost of $60? Am I missing something?

1408

The 3% fee is paid for with Bilt Cash. You accumulate Bilt Cash at a rate of 4% per dollar spent. The idea is that if your rent or mortgage is, say, $1000, the fee is $30. $30 is 4% of $750, which is the spend you’d need on the card to accumulate $30 in Bilt Cash and thus 1,000 Bilt points for paying your $1k rent or mortgage.

This is why, as you allude to, the earn rates per dollar spent on the card are very complicated to work out, and do actually decrease as you pass the 75% threshold of your housing payment. It depends on how much you spend relative to your mortgage or rent. Now there are other ways to liquidate Bilt Cash - hotels on the travel portal, Walgreens, Blacklane, Lyft, etc. Depending on how you value those credits, it might make spend beyond the 75% threshold more palatable.

1409

Yes, the 2.33x-4x points per dollar charged to the card IF you also pay your housing expense from the checking account.

The calculation does include the fee for paying for housing. The fee is $0 if you charge enough money to the credit card.

$2K rent and $500 spent on Palladium using Housing-only rewards (where you don’t need Bilt Cash to cover the fee) results in 1000 points from spend (2x/1$) and 1000 points from housing (0.5x/$1). That’s 2000 points on $500 charged = 4x.

$500 spent on Palladium using Flexible Bilt Cash results in 1000 points from spend (2x/1$), and $20 in Bilt Cash (4%/$1), enough to pay $667 in housing and earn 667 points (1x/$1) without additional fees. That’s 1667 points on $500 charged = 3.33x. This assumes you can make a partial housing payment, or maybe make a full payment but only earn 667 in rewards. I don’t know if this is possible without paying extra fees, but clearly the Housing-only rewards would be much better in this case because it does allow you to make a full $2K housing payment without fees.

I made a spreadsheet for this. If someone really wants to see it I could probably share via google sheets. Plenty of other people have made calculators available online though. Screenshot below. The “vs best” column is to compare with BofA 2.625% cash back using two valuations for Bilt points: 1c and 1.6c. Also compares Palladium vs Blue. Does not consider the AF or any “coupons” that come with the AF. I can’t use most of those coupons, so I’d need quite a bit of monthly spend to overcome the AF.

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