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I woke up during the night and couldn’t stop thinking about Bilt Cash, now that we know the details of what you can spend it for. I know that makes me strange. I kept thinking about all of the different ways to use it, and how to model out what’s really going on here.
I’m looking forward to using it to earn a minimum of 3 points per dollar (on the first $25,000 in annual spend) on the Bilt Palladium Card (See rates and fees) that I’ve been approved for. Many of you will like using it with the Bilt Obsidian Card (See rates and fees) to earn 4x points on your choice of dining or grocery spend (up to $25,000 per year). And I really like the notion of redeeming it for free Blade helicopter transfers (more than redeeming for $10 monthly Lyft credits, though that’s real money savings).
- They want you to think of it as cash (that you can redeem ‘dollar for dollar’ with Bilt and its partners) but I don’t want you to think of it that way at all for a moment.
- And don’t think of Bilt’s new products as a rent or mortgage card. You can pay your rent or mortgage through Bilt (ACH from your bank to them, they pay it, and they earn some money on the float) and that allows you to earn more points. It’s one feature that they offer.
Earning housing payment points seems complicated to some folks because earning the points involves redeeming Bilt Cash which you earn from spending on the card, or from earning points other ways with Bilt (you earn 4% of your card spend in Bilt Cash in addition to earning points for your spending, and you earn $50 in Bilt Cash for every 25,000 points earned in the program as well).
Instead, the way that I’m thinking about Bilt Cash right now is as a way to let you choose the benefits you want from the program. Plenty of programs, from Delta SkyMiles to American AAdvantage, offer choice benefits to their status (i.e. engaged) members. Bilt offers a ton of these along the way to all members, but the more engaged you are in the program – from earning with its partners, or living in its buildings, or spending on its cards, the more choice benefits you’re earning.
Bilt touts ‘over $4,500 in credits per year’ through Bilt Cash, which is more total credits than Amex Platinum. With Amex Platinum you get all of the benefits, many of which won’t really interest you. Maybe you have no interest in an Oura ring but you buy one anyway and try to resell it (oy, the resale market now…).
Here, Bilt gives you only the benefits you want but they offer a whole lot of interesting benefits, from earning more points (I wish I could trade the Amex Equinox benefit, Priority Pass and Oura ring for more points) to free Blade helicopter rides to Blacklane car service rides.
I get why they promote Bilt Cash as an additional 4% earn, and the ability to ‘spend it dollar for dollar’ in their network. It’s true! You can take $10 bilt cash and spend it on Lyft each month and if you were going to take a $10+ lyft ride that’s a real $10 in your pocket.
But the way I think about it is, the standard way to do benefits is to give every benefit to everyone, and that’s expensive. Here, you have a way to ration your benefits. That’s sustainable with high value benefits (especially ones that aren’t fully funded by the merchant) and to give you the ones you actually want. You don’t need to care about Stubhub (Chase) or Equinox (Amex) or a specific set of restaurants. You allocate your ‘benefits budget’ to the things you value most.
And it’s smart in another way. Everyone gets the same benefits from premium cards, more or less, whether they ever spend on the card or not. Amex Platinum is a great benefits card! But it’s not a very good spending card outside of airfare. Bilt set things up to provide more benefits to customers who spend more, and customers get to decide which benefits.
- For Bilt, cash serves as a way to bring more business into their network, which benefits their partners.
- It also makes the network more attractive to potential partners, which grows the network.
- And that means more offers available with Bilt Cash, which makes the currency more valuable.
There are a bunch of ways to spend Bilt Cash now, but this model would expect that the offers will change.and there will be new offers. And you don’t have to wait until an annual renewal to change benefits, you get to pick fresh every month so you aren’t locked in.
The one thing that keeps this from growing into a ‘real currency’ is expiration. Bilt Cash balances expire December 31 and you can only roll over $100. For a program that paid interest on points balances to elites expiring all balances seems off-brand. They want to manage their liability, I get that, but –
- If the 4% bilt cash is supposed to be like real cash
- Its value declines significantly as you approach end of year
- So the incentive to earn more goes down markedly
In other words, expiration of bilt cash serves as a disincentive to put big spending on the cards in November and December. They will want to fix that.
Bilt 2.0 is a steaming pile of garbage.
How much did Ankur pay you to make this post?
It’s stupid.
Gary, have a little shame for once in your life. Not a good trait for a father.
I’ve also been thinking more about this. My overall impression is that it feels like we are being asked to pay to beta test something (and that’s being kind). And if Bilt Cash has a real value, I’m not sure that redeeming it for points always makes sense?
Expiration of Bilt Cash – The idea that Bilt Cash earned in December expires immediately makes no sense. You basically have to spend down all of your Bilt Cash by November and for the $100 rollover either (i) redeem everything but $100 Bilt Cash in November and spend $0 in December or (ii) spend only $2500 in December to earn $100 Bilt Cash. And they redesigned this card so folks would run more spend through it, right? They must know end of year has higher spending months, right? Isn’t this such an incredibly obvious flaw that people on Bilt’s team should have, you know, noticed it? And if they didn’t notice it, isn’t that completely bonkers and the opposite of confidence-inspiring?
Value of Bilt Cash – I have no idea what to value this stuff at yet (the 12/31 expiration date certainly has an impact on value) and I’m sure the laundry list of redemptions will be constantly changing. But some of it does seem to have a $ for $ use ($10/mo Lyft credits perhaps – although already have other cards with $10/month Lyft credits – $10/mo Walgreens, $25/mo restaurants, etc.). For the moment, say you value Bilt Cash at 100 cents on the $. In terms of buying points, take these examples-
The SUB is $495 real cash for 50k points. If you just want the points and value everything else at $0 (I know the $300 Bilt Cash, Gold status, coupons etc have a value, but bear with me) it’s buying Bilt Points at ~1cpp (0.0099 but we can round here, right?). Makes sense for points you value at ~2cpp.
Let’s say you spend $37.5k/yr on the card. That gets you $1500 in Bilt Cash (yes, you get an extra $50 for $25k spend) and would support an extra 50k points on a 50k housing payment. Would you pay $1500 real cash for 50k points? That’s 3cpp for something valued at ~2cpp (it’s a $3 Bilt Cash:100 Bilt points ratio). You’re already getting 2x points on the spend – I view that as separate and not part of the calculation (and I can get 2x points on a $0 DoubleCash).
OK – let’s say you value Bilt Cash at 50c on the $. So now that’s 1.5cpp. Would you be a buyer of Bilt Points at 1.5cpp of real cash? Maybe! But you’d have to think about it, right?
Even worse is the points accelerator on 25k spend, because that’s at 4cpp ($200×5 redemptions = $1000 in Bilt Cash = 25,000 extra points). Would you pay 4cpp in real cash for something that is worth ~2cpp? And if you value Bilt Cash at 50c on the $, it’s just a trade for equivalent value – buying points at 2cpp that you might value at ~2cpp.
Yes you can get more than 2cpp of value from Bilt Points, but seems like you are relying on the potential outsized value of Bilt’s transfer bonuses in order to extract meaningful value. Yes also the Alaska / Hyatt transfers, but there are other ways to earn with those programs.
Am I missing something? Yes I realize Bilt Cash is like monopoly money, and if you view it all as gravy on top of the 2x spend, wonderful, but this community loves to assign a value to things, folks will want to do that with Bilt Cash, and at certain values “buying the points” with Bilt Cash may not make the most sense.
Which – makes this even more confusing! We are now at a ridiculous number of layers of confusion about this program. Are most people going to want to engage with it? And if they don’t, isn’t there a real risk this house of cards comes crashing down?
Gary, you are thinking about it because it is legitimately an interesting mechanism for providing benefits to users. The arguments against it seems to be: 1) it is complex (on its face it is, though I suspect the actual experience will be less complex than explaining it now because it is alien to us — it will take Bilt a little while to train users and get buy in), and 2) I’m mad that it has caps and restrictions (we all want an unlimited 6x card, but…c’mon y’all, your expectations have to match reality — coupons are never mean to get you spending only $50 at Saks or $10 at a Restaurant — they are there to drive real spending).
You laid out the argument for it: it doesn’t make you feel like you have to use every credit to “break even” or “come out ahead.” On its own, the Obsidian or the Palladium are good enough cards for spending — you would want them in your wallet anyway. Then, as you spend on the card, you generate opportunities to engage with their network. The other piece that is key: consumers will adjust their behavior to address breakage. If Bilt wants people to spend in December, they have to make it work for the consumer. For most, I don’t think this will be an issue. A bigger spender with small or no rent/mortgage might run out of opportunities for Bilt Cash. Well…. that’s Bilt’s problem to fix. If they want to drive more spending, they have to find ways to make Bilt cash more relevant/useful. If people feel forced to use low value offers for Bilt Cash, they won’t value it. If Bilt can’t grow it’s payment network for restaurants…nobody will use the benefit and people won’t be as motivated to spend.
I would be interested in buying into Bilt 2.0 if it didn’t feel like using the card meant keeping track of two separate currencies, the points and the cash, and then having to keep tabs on how much I was spending to fully maximize my returns on the points.
I wish Gary would stop asking us to not calculate rent into the equation, because rent and mortgage is what the Bilt ecosystem has touted as its greatest benefit. Anyway, $3,400 in rent would require $2,550 in additional spending, and it seems as though I would first need to apply the cash toward the transaction fee on my rent before I could think of applying it toward any of the other perks. Or maybe that arrangement is only true if you bought into Bilt 2.1 and not Bilt 2.2.
I get it, they’re pushing hard to make this the ultimate go-to card. The transfer partners are competitive; however, despite the coupon trend, users want a degree of simplicity for card usage. Spend against X category, earn X number of points, and enjoy these statement credits along the way.
Bilt has made this unnecessarily complicated, in part, because they needed to justify three separate products. I would have preferred they release one card and create an ascending list of perks based on spending. At minimum, I would have liked them to have said: Alright 10 transactions minimum to unlock full point accumulation against rent and mortgage payments, or whatever would have made financial sense to make the ecosystem sustainable.
Bilt does not have a corner on the maximizing rent payment market. I’m going to pull out and wait for a more reputable bank to run with the concept. Good luck to y’all though. For those of you who can make it work, crush it while you can. My gut feeling says jump while the ship is still afloat. Learn from the Mesa mess.
@Joe “I wish Gary would stop asking us to not calculate rent into the equation, because rent and mortgage is what the Bilt ecosystem has touted as its greatest benefit.”
You can calculate it! I’m just say, even before we get there it’s huge value. So housing payments -> points is just an add-on.
There are clearly some people like @RC and @Connor who are angry that after 4+ years, earning points for rent without doing any other spend or engagement is going away. Thing is, every opportunity eventually closes and you move onto the next one. You shouldn’t let it color your view of the value here. By the way, a lot of us with mortgages didn’t have that, do have this, and it’s pretty great 🙂
I too wake up in the middle of the night thinking how to maximize $5 monthly gopuff credits.
Oddly enough, I too am a loser, woke up at 2:30AM and started thinking about how to integrate the BILT Palladium into my shrinking credit card set up ; ) At non rent/mortgage spend of 75% of rent/mortgage, you will earn 3.3 points per dollar which is tremendous. The points accelerator is interesting, but I don’t really consider it earning a 4.3x on non rent/mortgage spend. It takes a while (unless you put massive spend on the card which lowers the points earned per $ spent) to earn the BILT cash required to buy the points accelerator. Based on non rent/mortgage spend of roughly equivalent to the rent/mortgage, the points earned can be north of 3, but less than 3.3.
Ankur and Richard, I know you read these comments so just wanted to put it out there that like Gary, my opinion is also for sale. I will also speak glowingly of $5 gopuff credits and $5 Bilt neighborhood parking credits for a fee. I will let everyone know what a great feature it is to have my cash expire every December, I wish the US treasury would give me the same benefit. Reach out to me directly for pricing.
@Peter Bilt cash can’t be compared to real money. It’s their interchange fee that they are giving you which is quite generous that’s why it’s 4% on all cards. I have no idea how they are making money as they are giving you 2x and giving you real tangible credits that can be redeemed 1:1 with Bilt cash. There is not another 4% you get with a VX card you just get 2x and that’s it. I’m thinking this wasn’t the original plan and that’s why it took so long to release as they were scrambling to get partners to agree to points redemption for credits. They felt they had to do it because of the negative PR with the 2.0 launch. Feels like they will be needing another VC infusion in a year or two.