When Bilt launched their new credit cards earlier this year, they nerfed a prized benefit that some users of their old no annual fee Wells Fargo card loved: the ability to make five transactions of any kind and qualify to earn points paying rent with the card each month for free.
The joke among members was that they’d buy ‘five bananas’ in five separate transactions. Some filld up their car at the gas pump in five separate purchases. Others bought 5 Amazon gift cards for $5. Bilt had something of a sense of humor about the whole thing, creating commemorative artwork of the bananas.
The new cards require you to spend on other things to earn points paying rent (or mortgage), but there’s no longer any limit to the housing payments you can make while earning points. The message was that this is a valuable program for those who engage in it, but that they can’t subsidize outsized value for people not actually using it for anything else.
Towards that end, they’ve eliminated another loophole.
- Bilt has offered a flat 250 points for paying rent outside of their designated earn relationships – pay rent for instance via ACH, with no card at all, and you’d earn 250 points.
- $1 rent payments generated the 250 points.
- Now ACH, debit, peer-to-peer, and flexible-payment rent payments earn 1 point per dollar up to 250 points per monthly payment instead of a flat 250 per payment.
It’s no longer possible to earn large numbers of points on very small payments.
Bilt also says they’re adding Venmo and other peer-to-peer payment providers as well as Livble and Flex to properties in the Bilt Alliance (where Bilt processes rent and provides other services) “in the coming months” and on a “rolling basis.”
There’s no other changes to making housing payments using a Bilt Card or other credit card (like Alaska, United, and Air France KLM).
This change does not bother me at all, as they manage their costs and want to avoid overspending on members that are running up the score. The cost control change that I am disappointed by is that they’ve limited transfer bonuses, month after month, to 100,000 points. That’s a change I predicted the first time I saw it with the British Airways transfer bonus earlier this year.
Ok, if this isn’t ‘sponsored content’ I don’t know what is.
Gary, you’re joining BILT in mocking 1.0, when it’s been over for 6 months now; meanwhile, there’s a real problem with BILT Cash, in that it’s next-to-impossible to redeem it before expiration, once you have a glut of it. Some folks with literal thousands of BILT Cash are gonna be out of luck, unless Ankur and team extend expiration, add new 5x Accelerators (beyond the 5 limit), or actually have higher-value redemptions go-live (Blade, Blacklane STILL ‘coming soon.’)
Why not address any of these real issues instead of this fluff?
I think Bilt is cruising for a lawsuit if Blacklane and Blade don’t get sorted. In particular, with Blade you’ve got a measurable harm in the form of a JFK-Manhattan taxi vs burning Bilt cash (as advertised).
@Gray — Thank you. At times, I feel like I’m one of the few people actually calling this out, only for an onslaught of corporate-shills to deflect, try to sane-wash, and lob ad hominems at me.
@Peter, has coined BILT Cash as “B$,” which is fitting, because it’s sure starting to feel like… BullSh…
@1990 i literally wrote a post titled “Bilt Cash is Use-it-or-lose-it” just lack week. I’ve written several times that the expiration rule bothers me, that it hurts for high spenders. As far as why write this? Because it’s new information.
@Gary Leff — And, the issue is that ‘using it’ is extremely limited. So, no real updates on things that actually matter, other than BILT further skimping out on the rather pathetic ‘250 points rule.’ As you say, “There’s no other changes”… oof.
I hate Bilt 2.0. Am I confused about the 250 loophole? I pay 6k for rent. Do I still have to spend 6k on top of everyday spending to earn more than 250 points? I use the palladium card and the rollout was not intuitive. I got various answers from all BILT agents about all the ways to make it work for me. All contradictory and inconsistent. I am not alone.
@1990 – maximizing credit card perks is no walk in the park, and with BILT 2.0 we all know it’s on another level. Gary has written plenty about these topics, both strategies for making the most of it as well as pointing out the traps of the card. I would hope that you have better things to do with your day than troll a blog post author like you’re a Russian bot twitter account circa 2016… but maybe not idk
@Duff — Ankur, Kerr, that you? Glad I got your attention. Fellas, fix BILT Cash. Get Blade and Blacklane up’n’running. “Coming Soon” no mas.
@Gary – I have to agree completely with @1990. I read your piece and while it’s nice for you almost none of it is either relevant or worthwhile for me. Saving ten bucks at Walgreens to try to shed some of my Bilt cash stash is not something I consider a win and I don’t use food delivery services. The Palladium card holds top position in my wallet for now but if I end up losing lots of Bilt cash due to not being willing to jump through crazy hoops then I’m going to be unhappy with Bilt and will have to reevaluate my card usage. I’m hoping that Bilt will see reason and find some practical way for those of us who continued to stick with their ecosystem and are not gaming anything to see some viable options for use rather than just seeing the cash flushed down the toilet.
@Christian — Thank. You. Some would suggest that you and I are merely losers who aren’t trying hard enough. Yet, I’ve been burning B$10/month on Walgreens, Grubhub, and Lyft (so, there’s B$30/mo, B$360/year). I’ve burned B$200 5x on all the Accelerators (B$1000/year). I’ve burned B$100 2x (B$200) on their travel portal stacked with the $200 semi-annual credit with Palladium, but, no, I’m not gonna do a monthly 12x B$100 for a two-night-minimum-stay via their over-priced platform. Otherwise, I’d need to use their fee-offset on rent/mortgage, and maybe start helping others pay their rent/mortgage, which is absurd, unless and until BILT provides more options to use B$. Because, as it stands, the program is mathematically-designed to get us to let excess B$ expire. Folks do not like to feel as if they’ve lost hundreds of dollars of corporate pseudo-currency, even if it is Monopoly money.