Bilt Palladium’s Hidden Power Move: How Homeowners Can Earn 4X Points On All Everyday Spend

We already know that the Bilt Palladium Card (See rates and fees) can work as a 3.3 points per dollar-earning card (earning the most valuable Points out there) by pairing it with housing payments. But did you know you can actually use this feature to earn 4 Bilt Points per dollar on all of your spending?

Bilt Rewards has two earning styles. One is to earn 4% back in Bilt Cash in addition to your points (up to $100 of Bilt Cash earned rolls over to the next year).

The other is fixed ‘housing-only rewards’. And it creates a very interesting opportunity to turn Bilt Palladium into a four points per dollar-earning card on all of your spending. This won’t be something everyone does, and it’s really only available to homeowners with equity. But it’s potentially huge.

Here’s how ‘housing-only rewards’ works. You give up earning Bilt Cash directly with the card. However,

• Spend at least 25% of your monthly housing payments on everyday purchases, earn 0.5X points on your housing payments
  
• Spend at least 50% of your monthly housing payments on everyday purchases, earn 0.75X points on your housing payment
  
• Spend at least 75% of your monthly housing payments on everyday purchases, earn 1X points on your housing payments
  
• Spend the same or more of your monthly housing payments on everyday purchases, earn 1.25X points on your housing payments

The sweet spot here is spending just 25% of your housing payment on the card each month. Reader Matt explains:

Using option 1 (points only, no Bilt Cash…), you can “top up” your mortgage payment to 4X of your spend rather than 1X. I know a 0.5 multiplier doesn’t sound nearly as sexy as a 1.25x multiplier, but the math checks out and makes a 54,000 point difference annually for my [‘player 2’]. It would be far greater if we threw my spend in there as well.

I also know this is a special case and will only work for a small-ish subset of people. These include those with multiple mortgages who are unable to raise their everyday spend to match their mortgage. As long as they hit the 25% mark and get the 0.5 multiplier on their mortgage points they’ll effectively be getting 4 points per dollar.

You might think that this is pretty limited. After all, it’s only 4x points on your spending up to a quarter of the amount of your housing payment. So if you spent $3,000 a month on housing, you’d only earn 4x on $750 per month in card spend.

But wait, there’s more!

I already wrote about paying down your mortgage faster than making just the minimum monthly payment, in order to increase your housing payment and thus the amount of bonus-earning with the Bilt card.

But Matt points out something obvious that doesn’t really require you to give up that extra cash. Draw down a home equity loan, and then immediately pay it back through Bilt.

It reminds me of 20 years ago when frequent flyers all took out home equity lines from Chase for the United miles. Back then it was:

• 4,250 miles for each 10,000 borrowed
  
• They paid the costs like appraisal, title, etc.
  
• You paid about 4 days of interest to close the loan, withdraw the funds, and pay it back.
  
• So a $400,000 home equity loan earned 170,000 miles at a cost of $170

Well, it’s not the old days. But a HELOC really lets you you scale 4x points-earning on all of your spending.

• If your everyday spending hits 25% of your housing payment, you earn 50% of the points of your housing payment. In other words, that’s an additional 2x points on your spending. So you earn 2 points per dollar with Bilt Palladium plus 2 points per dollar spent on housing.

• Take whatever your amount of non-housing spend on the card is for the month, and draw down your HELOC for four times that amount and then immediately pay it off.

• You’ll pay a few dollars in interest to do that, assuming say ~ 4 days to draw down the money and use Bilt to pay it back.

If you have or open a home equity line of credit, you can use it to earn 4 Bilt Rewards points per dollar on all of your spending. As Matt puts it,

Artificially raise housing payments to 4x [the amount of your card] spend to optimize the function and receive the most amount of points possible for the spend. This is NOT about how much your mortgage payment is. This is about maximizing the reward for how much you spend monthly.

There’s no limit to the amount of points you can earn on housing rewards any longer with Bilt. They did this intentionally. You can pay your rent and a child’s rent. Pay your mortgage, the rent on a vacation home, and rent for your in-laws (hopefully they’ll pay you back). This isn’t a loophole, it’s literally something that Bilt Rewards promotes.

Yet somehow I haven’t seen anyone put scaling your housing payment together with fixed ‘housing-only rewards’ in order to earn 4 points per dollar on all of your spending rather than just earning 3.3 points per dollar.

The card provides Gold status your first year as a cardmember once you earn the initinal bonus 50,000 points after spending $4,000 on everyday purchases in the first 3 months. Gold members are frequently offered 75% transfer bonuses on Rent Day. If you spend $50,000 on the card in a year you become Platinum, which often means 100% transfer bonuses. Those 4 points per dollar could easily translate into 8 points per dollar in a transfer partner program.

Bilt Palladium Card