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The Bilt Palladium Card (See rates and fees) has gotten a lot of attention since it went live earlier this year. It is still underrated.
That’s because people complain that it’s too complicated. But it’s only complicated if you choose to really maximize it. Even at its most simple, it’s a better general spending card for rewards than anything else on the market.
- It has the potential to be a 4x on everything card, but you could ignore every feature the card has and just treat it as ‘2x on everything’
- And you’d still be earning the most valuable points, with the best transfer partners.
- Plus, Bilt Rewards has the biggest transfer bonuses, often up to 100%.
But you can do much, much better than that. Here are the card basics.
- This is $495 annual fee card. It can will earn up to 1.25X points on rent and mortgage payments with no transaction fee. And it earns 2X points on everyday spend.
- The initial bonus offer is 50,000 Bilt Points + Gold Status after spending $4,000 on everyday purchases in the first 90 days + $300 of Bilt Cash.
- Benefits include a $400 Bilt Travel Hotel credit. Applied twice a year, as $200 statement credits, for qualifying Bilt Travel Portal hotel bookings. You also receive $200 Bilt Cash (awarded annually). At the end of each calendar year, any Bilt Cash balance over $100 will expire. Priority Pass ($469/year value). (See Guide to Benefits.)
You can spend your Bilt Points at 1.25 cents apiece towards travel through their portal, or transfer them to their 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
- Hotels: World Of Hyatt, IHG One Rewards, Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, Accor ALL – Accor Live Limitless, Wyndham Rewardsm, Preferred Hotels I Prefer
My question at this point, though, is why don’t more people understand this?
[Bilt] Palladium Cardholder here – i think this is the best card on the market. Obvious reasons below
– Can pay rent/mortgage
– 3.3x catch all – 3x minimum
– Access to wide variety of Transfer Partners
– BILT CASH is underrated (factoring in the ability to get better value when you transfer points on rent day)
Note on the points – I’m quite surprised how quickly the points accumulate with Bilt.
If you value points and transfer partners and getting maximum value for your points – this is it
I know that there was a lot of frustration and confusion at card launch. They were transitioning from away from Wells Fargo and moving from one card to three cards on a very compressed timeline.
You can choose to earn 4% back in Bilt Cash on top of your points for spending with this card, but when they launched they didn’t have a list of what you could actually do with the Bilt Cash or the terms for each of the things you might redem for. That took another week.
Plus, many older cardmembers didn’t like losing the ability to make 5 $1 purchases a month (and nothing else) and earn 1 point per dollar spent charging rent. That was a money-losing formula and Bilt changed it with the new cards, and those for whom the new products were no longer useful were not at all happy.
And while everything went pretty smoothly for me, a few readers had difficulty making rent and mortgage payments with the card. You can earn additional points for housing payments, but you have to be able to rely on Bilt to process those. There were some early hiccups that seem to have been resolved.
Frequent Miler has a good podcast on this. Their view was that the card’s rollout problems have settled into normal ‘background noise’.
Greg Davis-Kean says complaints have “slowed down considerably” and now feel more like the ordinary complaints they hear about Chase or other issuers. Nick Reyes agreed that it no longer seems like a widespread problem:
“I think it’s slowed to more of that type of thing with Bilt… it’s not the norm that people are having problems with. It’s more the norm that people are in better shape with it these days.
They haven’t used the card for housing payments, but still use it to earn 3 points per dollar spent. They redeem Bilt Cash for ‘points accelerator’ where $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.)
Greg doesn’t just use Palladium as his catch-all (the card for spending where other cards don’t earn bonus points) but sometimes even where other cards earn 3x too.
I’ve been using the Palladium card as my everywhere else card lately… when I’m not earning 3x or more with some other card, I use the Bilt Palladium… I think you can make a good argument that why not use it even when other things are 3x because it averages somewhere in that neighborhood.
Nick does what I do: “This has become the ultimate player two card… my wife uses this and only this… I don’t care if it’s dining or grocery or whatever. It’s going to be three points per dollar.”
With Bilt Palladium, you don’t need to give your spouse or partner a stack of cards with instructions on what to use each one for. My wife still uses Amex Gold for groceries and restaurants at 4x. But she’s down to actually using just two cards, which she appreciates.
She has an authorized user card on my account. That costs $95 and comes with another Priority Pass card. Perhaps the real reason why they charge is that an authorized user can generate another 5 Points Accelerators if they’re Gold or above. You can choose to credit the points and Bilt Cash from their spend to their account instead of the primary cardmember’s. They get their own monthly Rent Day bonus on card spend and it’s a way of doubling the Points Accelerator cap.
“This is really interesting now that I think about it because… if you’re doing your spend at 3x… $33,333 gets you about the 100,000 points that you could transfer. And if you get an additional 25% bump by buying up to the next level [of transfer bonus], you get an additional 25,000 points. That’s almost an additional built point for every dollar that you’ve spent… it’s essentially like almost getting 4x on that spend.
What he’s saying is:
- Earn 100,000 Bilt Points
- Take advantage of a Rent Day transfer bonus when offered, using Bilt Cash to bump the bonus an additional 25%. Say the bonus then is 125%.
- You’d net 225,000 points with their partner.
- And that’s doable with $33,333 spend, which is 6.75 points per dollar spent.
I’ve taken advantage of transfer bonuses to Japan Airlines, British Airways, Hawaiian Airlines (since merged with Alaska), Virgin Atlantic and Air France KLM.
I pay my mortgage with no fee through Bilt and haven’t had any issues. I redeem Bilt Cash so that I earn 1 point per dollar of that payment. There’s no cap, and you can pay mortgage or rent for others too to earn points. But neither Nick nor Greg are making housing payments using Bilt and still lean heavily into the card.
The early rollout back in January and February was rocky, and even though things smoothed out that’s a reasonable choice for folks to make. But my own view is that the points are simply so valuable you’re leaving too much on the table if you don’t lean into this program.
It’s all fun and games until Bilt messes up your housing payments
@RC – If you’re concerned about that, then just don’t use it for housing payments, it’s still easily a 3x card with the best points
To get bonus points on purchases you need to understand Bilt Cash not to be confused with Bilt points. Then if you get past that you need to hope card less and the underlying bank are playing nice and not declining charges. I’m hoping over the next year they revamp and things smooth out.
Even Bilt is confused with their own program. I moved to the Housing Only rewards plan where you don’t earn Bilt Cash from card spending. But I had over $400 in Bilt Cash in my account, and you can still earn Bilt Cash in other ways (such as $50 Bilt Cash for every 25,000 Bilt points earned). I went to look for my Bilt Cash balance the other day and it was gone: not the balance, but there was no way to access Bilt Cash anywhere on the app or website. I reached out to customer support who told me that they can still see my balance, but I can’t use it and it won’t show up in my account while I’m on the Housing Only plan, and I would need to switch back to the Flexible Bilt Cash option for housing rewards to regain access. This is totally contrary to their own Ts & Cs and when I pushed back, they told me they would “get back to me”.
I agree that it’s a valuable ecosystem, but they also just make things up as they go along and are one of the most chaotic, unorganized financial companies I’ve ever seen. I’ve chosen to stay with it, but I totally get why people have major concerns.
@RC pay a little early and see how it goes. That’s what I did since launch and never had an issue. By waiting you are just losing out on a lot.
@Jack If they are declining charges that’s an issue but I just got back from China where I used it with my wechat account and the charges all went thru. I had to wait for the OTP to come thru but that was it. Have yet to have a charge decline whether in the US, Japan or China.
@Darin I’m surprised you didn’t lose all of your Bilt cash as it’s on a completely different track. Hopefully you get it back.
I’ve blown thru all 5 accelerators and have requalified for Platinum so on to subs and status spend. Card will still get spend as a catch all and I have earned enough bilt cash to get mortgage points for the rest of the year without further spend. May redeem Bilt cash for the $100 hotel credit for the second half booking but that’s about it. The only thing concerning is I can’t book a blade flight right now for a February trip. Bilt’s not at fault but wondering what is up with Blade.
Still amazing that they built their whole aura around “rent”
No one with sizable income or assets pays rent
Fin.
@ Gary — It’s all fun and games until the math blows up in Bilt’s face. In the meantime, earn and BURN applies. Do not hoard these points. Mark my word, if you do, you will get burned in a massive unannounced devaluation. (Or, they could do smaller serial devaluations by doing things like ending the transfer bonuses to everyone but Hilton, Wyndham, and Etihad, raise the annual fee a few hundred bucks, and make Bilt Cash completely useless.) Anything too good to be true, always goes away.
@ Coolio
Yung peeps are renting. Home ownership costs are too dam HI!
bilt is built for hi spending brand unloyal hobbyists who choose not to go for spend thresholds on other cards.
@ Gene – even as bilt devalues, spending 25K won’t not make sense with present ez bilt cash accelerators. Plus monthly bonus xfers offer 10%+ rebates on everyday spend…not sustainable.
I think this could be good for people if their biggest expense is rent or mortgage and they move points quckly as @Gene stated. Also maybe good for people with plenty of points in other banks so it’s not a huge loss if/when things devalue. Where Bilt doesn’t have the option of a business product with extremely high or even unlimited spend I wonder if that helps them maintain most of the current transfer ratios. Along with only holding one card and no product changing so churning isn’t an option. It will be interesting to see where it all goes in the future.
I’ve been heavily in the points game for almost 5 years and have successfully used points for several international trips, but honestly, just reading the above “simplified” version, I’m still confused. Too many things to understand to take full advantage of this. Bilt Points, Bilt Cash, Points Accelerators, Gold/Platinum status tiers, Rent Day bonuses, etc. And that’s putting aside the risk of paying a mortgage payment through them. Seems like way too much to have to figure out when I’m spending a bunch of time managing the benefits of other credit card points ecosystems – that I understand well.
With this mess and a lot of other premium cards I’m glad I just went with the bog standard free bilt card if nothing else just to keep the line.
Yeah sure I now don’t get points on rent, but it wasn’t much anyway, just a slight “nice to have” bump because I’m not in an HCOL area
I’ve been a Bilt card holder since 2021 and agree with most of what Gary has said. What he didn’t mention is that when something goes wrong, Cardless, the servicer is consistently incompetent. Very frustrating.
It’s one thing to deal with frustrating human customer service at a bank. It’s another to not be able to even speak with a human if something goes wrong. When you have to resort to reddit to get customer service to pay attention, is this a company that you are really going to risk your house payments with?
And fine – ignore the house payments and get 3x on $25k unbonused spend instead of 2x. Even if you value Bilt points at 2.0cpp because of the outsized transfer bonuses, you’re still paying a $495 AF for those extra 25k points, which is about what they are worth, no?
Instead, for most people who do not have $25k unbonused spend, why on earth would you not get a Citi Strata Premier for $95 (or $0 if you use the $100 travel coupon) and a 2x DoubleCash for $0. You get 2x on everything and a ton of 3x bonus categories (even more if you also pick up a $0 Regular Strata). And folks can say that Citi is terrible all they want – but they have human customer service that is able to resolve issues! And a fraud department that takes their job seriously.
Bilt is nowhere near ready for prime time. Give them a year or two to actually work out the kinks before actually putting spend through them. Otherwise, it’s a 50k SUB.
I use the card a lot but finding ways to effectively utilize large amounts of Bilt Cash is really tough.
I’ve been using Bilt as my go to card for general spending since 2.0 came out. I’ve used it for mortgage and HELOC payments with no issue.
My only frustration is Bilt cash. I already maxed out the points multiplier. Yet, as of now, I’m sitting on almost $2,800 and growing with no real opportunity to use it.
It’s not like it costs me anything but there’s something psychologically distracting seeing that number, knowing I will loose it at the end of the year and not really having any options to “spend” it.
@Principal Lewis — “The rent.. is too DAMN high!” party… he was right the whole time.
@Gary Leff — When is BILT finally gonna allow BILT Cash redemptions for Blacklane and Blade??