The Bilt Palladium Card Gets 6 Things Wrong — But It’s The Best Card For Everyday Spend By Far

The Bilt Palladium Card (See rates and fees) is an absolute beast. But there’s been a lot of noise around the roll out. And that’s discouraging some people from getting the card who would really benefit from it. Among some of the bumps in the road:

• Bilt fired customers of the old card who used it just to earn points on rent (making 5 super cheap purchases a month to qualify for rent points, and nothing else). Those cardmembers were big mad, resentful, and loud in their displeasure.

• Customers who moved their card balances from the old card to the new card didn’t always find that seamless. (You shouldn’t be revolving balances anyway.) Customers found that they couldn’t just leave their old rent payment set up in place, they needed to set it up with the new card. There were glitches with this for some customers at the outset. (For my mortgage they successfully pulled details from my credit report, but would have had me underpaying by 77 cents per month if I wasn’t paying attention.)

• Bilt Cash details weren’t ready on the day the card was announced. Their cards earn 4% back in Bilt Cash in addition to points, so it wasn’t even possible to even fully evaluate the value proposition of the cards. (Up to $100 in unused Bilt Cash rolls over to the next year.)

• Some cardmembers were being charged 0.2% on foreign transactions, even though it’s supposed to be a no foreign transaction fee card. These charges are being refunded.

Combined, they created enough of a general sense that things were rocky and scared some folks off, though my own experience has been excellent overall. That’s a shame – and a self-own on Bilt’s part – because this is the most valuable card in the market for spending, period. And it’s not even close.

You earn the most valuable points, and you earn them faster than with any other card. But there are frustrations and design decisions I wish they’d made differently.

• The most valuable points. You can spend points through their travel portal at 1.25 cents apiece, not one cent as a floor like you’ll generally find elsewhere. And they have the most and best transfer partners. They have Hyatt and United and Japan Airlines (Capital One also has JAL, but Bilt is 1:1 and Capital One is not) to name just a few.

  Here are their transfer partners:
  

  • Star Alliance: Air Canada Aeroplan, Turkish Miles & Smiles, United Airlines MileagePlus, Avianca LifeMiles, TAP Air Portugal Miles&Go
    
  • oneworld: Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, Iberia Plus, British Airways Club, Japan Airlines Mileage Bank, Qatar Airways Privilege Club
    
  • SkyTeam: Air France KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
    
  • Non-alliance: Emirates Skywards, Southwest Airlines, Aer Lingus Aer Club, Etihad Guest, Spirit Airlines Free Spirit
    
  • Hotels: World Of Hyatt, IHG One Rewards, Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, Accor ALL – Accor Live Limitless

  

• Earning points the fastest. If the Bilt Palladium Card was just a 2x on spend card, it would be top of market and a great ‘catch all’ for spend not earning bonuses elsewhere, replacing the spend I was doing on Venture X, since the points themselves are more valuable. But it’s much better than this.
  • When matching spend with housing payments, you can earn 3.3 points per dollar
    
  • When redeeming Bilt Cash earned on the card for Points Accelerator, you can earn 3 points per dollar
    
  • Advanced players can even turn this into a 4x on all qualifying spend card by foregoing Bilt Cash entirely and opting to earn on housing at 50% of spend, and then withdrawing and then immediately paying back at HELOC through Bilt each month at twice your month’s spend.

The basics of the card:

• Initial bonus offer: 50,000 Bilt Points + Gold Status after spending $4,000 on everyday purchases in the first 3 months + $300 of Bilt Cash.

• Earning: 2X Bilt Points on everyday spend and you can choose to earn 4% back in Bilt Cash on everyday spend. (Up to $100 of Bilt Cash earned rolls over to the next year.)

• Benefits: $400 Bilt Travel Hotel credit (applied twice a year, as $200 statement credits, for qualifying Bilt Travel Portal hotel bookings) and $200 Bilt Cash awarded annually, along with a Priority Pass ($469/year value, see guide to benefits).

• Annual fee: $495

Since I’m earning at least 3 points per dollar and often more than that on the bulk of my spending, this card even replaces other cards with 3 points per dollar accelerator bonuses. It doesn’t get my airfare (which earns 5x on American Express Platinum, and 8x through the Chase portal with Sapphire Reserve). And it doesn’t get dining or groceries which earn 4x with Amex Gold (the latter capped at $25,000 in spend in the category per year). It also doesn’t get hotel (4x with Sapphire Reserve, 4x at Hyatt with the Hyatt card). But it basically gets everything else now.

Still, there are things that I wish were different about it. In fact, there are (6) things that frustrate me most about the new Bilt Palladium Card.

• Authorized user cards. These come with a fee and Priority Pass. I much prefer Capital One’s approach of no fee to do more spending on the product, but pay a fee to add lounge access to the card. This isn’t a huge issue in that it’s industry-standard (how Chase, Amex work) but not ideal. Who needs another Priority Pass? The bigger bummer is that authorized user spend can’t be points-accelerated. So it’s earning me 2x, not 3x.

• Too many Expedia hotels in Bilt Travel. Bilt’s $200 Palladium hotel credit is easier to use than Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts and Chase’s The Edit because you can use it on any hotel bookable through their portal on a stay that’s two nights or more. They make it easy to stack this $200 credit with a $100 Bilt Cash credit during the check-out process, too. But there are too many hotels where the inventory comes from Expedia. Sometimes they’re better rates than you’ll get elsewhere, too. But it means these rates do not earn elite stay credit, points or receive elite benefits and that’s often a non-starter for me.

• Can’t earn points paying taxes. This really surprised me to see when the card came out. It’s a lot of spending that doesn’t make sense to do on this card. And what’s odd is that my understanding is interchange on tax payments is pretty good. So there must be a bet that people plan their taxes (much like rent!) and pay it off completely, so is less likely to generate revolve.

• Lower credit line than I used to have. I have a 20% lower credit line than I had with their Wells Fargo card. That’s less frustrating than it might be because it doesn’t make sense to pay taxes on this card. But it still means I should watch my balance, and potentially pay the card down mid-cycle, but that’s a bit of a worry because cycling can be a trigger for fraud alerts.

• Can only redeem one ‘points accelerator’ at a time. I can redeem $200 in Bilt Cash to earn an additional 1 point per dollar on the next $5,000 card spend. That’s great, turning a 2x card into a 3x card. But you can only redeem for one $5,000 tranche at a time. That means you (1) have to watch where you are in your progress towards that $5,000 (they should you in the app, which is good) so you know when to redeem the next one, and (2) that you’re going to lose the extra point on some spending.

  Say you have $50 left in your $5,000 points accelerator, and put a $250 charge on the card. That’s $200 in spend you don’t get the extra point on. Say you have $1,000 left but you have a $5,000 charge.. you might want to put off that $5,000 charge until you use up the current points accelerator and redeem for the next one.

• Expiring Bilt Cash. They have a real opportunity to create a their own currency, circulating within their ever-expanding ecosystem, and that makes Bilt a preferred network for any merchant to join (since there’s built-in demand) and keeps consumers spending in the network. But Bilt Cash expires – they let you roll over just $100 at the end of a year. That means it’s not as good an idea to spend on this card at the end of a year as at the beginning, at least for large charges.

  That incentive is backward, right when consumers are spending the most! And it’s going to frustrate their best customers, who are the ones that’ll build up the most unspent Bilt Cash. I understand how breakage can look better in a spreadsheet, but expiring Bilt Cash creates the opposite incentive compared to what they want to achieve, turns off customers and makes their network less valuable all at the same time.

Now that I have a card that’s really worth spending on and earning Bilt Points, keeping my Platinum status is super easy. And that means keeping my Air France KLM Flying Blue Gold (which gets me priority boarding, free checked bags and exit row seats on Delta) and an annual free BLADE helicopter transfer, among other benefits.

What’s your best card for spending? I’d love to hear the case why it earns more and better points than the Bilt Palladium Card. Make a real argument that your preferred cards earns faster, or that its points are better. Consider that a challenge, but use real logic not feelings or vibes.

Bilt Palladium Card