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In addition to earn 2x on my spending with the Bilt Palladium Card (See rates and fees), I’m also earning 4% in Bilt Cash on eligible spend.
That house currency is ‘use it or lose it’. At the end of each calendar year, any Bilt Cash balance over $100 will expire. So here’s how I use my Bilt Cash:
- Earning Bilt Points paying my mortgage. It basically costs 3 cents worth of Bilt Cash per point to pay mortgage (or rent) with no fee and earn points. A $2,000 housing payment costs $60 in Bilt Cash to earn 2,000 Bilt Points. (The Palladium card itself provides $300 Bilt Cash earned as part of its initial bonus and then $200 each year, and you’d earn $60 in Bilt Cash with $1,500 spend on the card – which would mean that $1,500 spend actually earned 3.33 points per dollar.)
- Points accelerator. $200 in Bilt Cash lets you earn an extra 1 point per dollar spent for the next $5,000 in spend. When you’re opted into earning Bilt Cash, that $5,000 spend earns another $200 in Bilt Cash, which pays for your next accelerator.
You can redeem Points Accelerators as a Gold or Platinum member 5 times per year, and when you earn the card’s initial bonus that boosts you to a year of Gold status. (And if you max out your points accelerators, you’ve done enough spend on the card to re-earn Gold without any other activity through Bilt.)
This lets you effectively earn 3 points per dollar on $25,000 spend.
- Transfer bonuses When Bilt runs a Rent Day transfer bonus, they generally let you add an additional 25% bonus for Bilt Cash. I spent $150 in Bilt Cash, for instance, bumping my Platinum transfer bonus from 75% to 100% when transferring to British Airways on May 1.
- $100 hotel credit top off. Each month Gold and Platinum members can redeem $100 Bilt Cash for $100 toward hotel bookings of two nights or more in the Bilt Travel Portal. What’s great is that it stacks with the Palladium card’s semi-annual $200 travel portal hotel credits. So I just booked a two night stay and saved $300.
Blue and Silver members can redeem $50 per month.
- $10 monthly Lyft credit. I actually prefer Lyft over Uber. In Austin it seems to be cheaper. The rewards are certainly better. I earn 5x Chase Ultimate Rewards on my credit card, and then credit the points to their Bilt or Alaska partnership and I get $10 a month to spend, too, with Bilt Cash. I rideshare weekly, and my most common trips are to and from airports but also around town at my destination (I don’t rent cars nearly as often as I used to).
- $10 monthly GrubHub credit. Oddly enough I have a DoorDash DashPass via Chase, UberOne via American Express, and GrubHub+ via Amazon Prime. So I’m not paying extra delivery fees to go through GrubHub. I also have been using $10 monthly credits from my Citi AAdvantage Executive card and my Amex Business Gold, and those stack because they’re rebated at the card statement level.
Initially Bilt was providing $10 GrubHub gift cards and you could save those up in your account. Now it’s a discount code, which means they can’t be accumulated, and you can’t combine them with other discount codes. But it’s still worth a legitimate $10 a month to me.
And it turns out the complete menu for my favorite nearby sushi place is only full and correct on GrubHub, and partial on DoorDash. So I go order it from GrubHub.
- $10 monthly Walgreens credit. These are Walgreens gift cards. I add them to the Walgreens app (which can store two at a time). So I make a Walgreens order every other month, spending the $20 for something I need to buy anyway, and I have it delivered because I’m lazy.
I’ll use the Blade and Blacklane credits once those are added. They’ve been ‘coming soon’ for five months and I’m getting anxious. My Platinum status comes with one Blade trip a year and I’ve redeemed three so far. I’ve already used my 2027 Platinum benefit, I need more.
And as for Blacklane, a car service is super helpful at some airports – like in Austin, traveling with two kids and checked bags and not having to schlepp to the rideshare lot at the end of two weeks in Europe or Australia.
There are a ton of other options, like GoPuff delivery; fitness classes; Bilt restaurant partner discounts; and a bunch of other options. But I keep it simple, these are the ones I actually use – and I prioritize earning more points first, followed by the hotel discount, but I find I’m making the Bilt Palladium Card my regular spend card enough that I’m earning far more Bilt Cash than I imagined so I’m not really that constrained.
Bilt Cash is brilliant on several levels:
- It makes merchant-funded credits earned
- It sets a budget for those – you actually get the ones you want, and they aren’t partially-funding credits for businesses and things you don’t care about
- It creates a currency that reinforces the network. It incentivizes transactions by consumers that Bilt is delivering to its partners, and the partners immediately gain value from extra business.
- It’s all funded by activity you’re doing – on the card, or earning through the program.
The downside of course is that choices are complicated. People like decisions being made for them, even when they say that they don’t. But Boris Yelstin saw the cornucopia of choice in a Houston Randall’s grocery store in 1989, and communism fell. I think we can manage this.
Boris Yeltsin visits a grocery store in Houston, Texas with an official Soviet delegation (1990)[1024×639]
by
u/Breab1 in
HistoryPorn
Gary, we got a real problem on the horizon with relatively unusable gluts of BILT Cash. Ankur really should waive the 5x max on the Accelerator, or just remove the annual expiration. Otherwise, folks are gonna be livid when they lose hundreds or thousands of ‘dollar’s in BC at year’s end. The math ain’t great, especially when high-value redemptions (Blacklane, Blade still “Coming Soon”) aren’t available for 6+ months. Of course, the BILT-shills are gonna light me up on here, like they have elsewhere, but I’m gonna keep calling it out, regardless.
@1990 – I agree that the annual expiration of balances > $100 in Bilt Cash is a problem. I don’t think it changes the value prop of the program, though.
I’d love to see a higher cap on accelerators, and in fact there really is one now – you can award points and bilt cash from an authorized user to that person’s account, and they can redeem for accelerators separately.
But the math has to math on the product and already it’s probably too rewarding. If they’re giving out more than an additional 25k points from spend, that’s expensive. Already 3 points per dollar on all spend cannot be profitable *for each dollar of spend*, but this is also a $495 annual fee card. It’s the annual fee that’s helping to fund it. They could fund more points than they do today with… a higher fee…
Gary, I believe the entire Bilt Cash system is much like the ” Who’s on first” routine from Abbout and Costello. ” and credit the points to their Bilt or Alaska membership and I get $10 a month to spend, too, with Bilt cash”. I have no idea what you are talking about with this example except that I use my Sapphire for Lyft rides but after that have no idea where you spent $10 of Bilt cash for a benefit to yourself. Really appears to be scam of smoke and mirrors, glad it works for you. I am dropping the card at renewal, too much work. Would be nice if I could donate to someone who can understand how to benefit from it.
@Gary Leff — Wait… we can share BC with P2 via an AU account? If so, that’d burn $1,000 BC on another 5x Accelerators (for the 25K bonus, over time). Not a bad temporary fix, if true. Why have none of Ankur’s goons mentioned this to me (sorry, at me) yet!
The problem with the expiration of cash at calendar year end as opposed to a rolling 12 months is that I think come September or so – they’re going to see a tremendous drop off in spending on the card. If you have enough Bilt cash to get your through mortgage and a few transfer bonuses – why spend on the card to earn more that will just expire? It’s a weird card that it’s good for moderately big spenders but not really big spenders. After $25000 spend a year it’s not as compelling. That being said – with their good transfer partners it’s still a 2x everything card so no real detriment to most of the other big 2x cards for otherwise non-bonus spend.
@1990 – you can’t share cash, an authorized user can receive cash from card spend into their own account and also points into their own account, so their spend can be done with their own accelerators
@Gary Leff — Oof. Feels very “In and out. 20 minutes adventure.” Oh man, Gary… *nervous chuckle*… I-I mean, oh geez, Gary, you really had me going there for a second! Wow. *gulps* For real, so P2 can build their own separate, ticking time-b*mb of expiring currency. (Not a fix, though!) @David gets it; high-spenders are gonna realize soon that any further spend just generates dead-on-arrival Bilt Cash, they’re gonna sock-drawer the cards. (“I was not in control of that situation at all!” *sobbing*)
@ 1990 — Put down the card and step away….
No one should care about losing BILT cash..its free. The Palladium already earns 2X points on EVERYTHING … if you cant use all your bilt cas you dident really lose anytning.
@GayrLovesBILT — There are ample 2x cards with no $495 AF are far superior then. BC is what makes 2.0 unique. If you have a glut that expires at the end of the year, it’s not worth renewing. Resolving this issue (or failing to) is gonna make (or break) BILT in 2027. Add more Accelerators or drop expiration. That’s my pitch.
@Gene — *drops card*
@1990 — My rule is “the sooner you cancel, the sooner you can score another SUB.” That’s the best long-term play for most cards, even AMEX, whose idea of “lifetime” is shorter than most people realize. It is closer to 7 minutes than 7 years…
@Gene — Churn and burn! *sizzle*
What I don’t understand is how on earth they are going to get people to sign up for this card in the fall. It’s a marketing disaster – here’s our great card, here’s a bunch of B$ to get you started, it’s great! Oh – whoops, you don’t get to carry over more than $100 of it to 2027, sorry!
And more than anything it’s a perception problem – when people see B$1000 balances or whatever suddenly go down to B$100 in 2027 they are going to be pissed.
You should have 1 year from the date of earning the B$ to use it. That largely solves the problem. So B$ earned in July 2026 is valid through July 2027, or something like that. But the year end cliff makes no sense.
@Peter — I love the short-hand… B$… sure feels like a load of bull.