← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
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- [00:00]
Jason
BILT sits at a strange intersection of incredibly valuable points, creative earning mechanics, and.
- [00:05]
Chris Hutchins
A level of complexity that makes it.
- [00:07]
Jason
Hard to tell if it's the best.
- [00:09]
Chris Hutchins
Deal in points, the most confusing reward system out there, or a little bit of both. So today I'm doing a deep dive on BILT and why I think they have the most valuable points out there. I'll break down how you can earn and redeem built points even without a credit card, walk through the new Bilt 2.0 card lineup, explain how BiltCash changes the math, and you show you which.
- [00:28]
Jason
Earnings path actually makes sense depending on how you spend.
- [00:32]
Chris Hutchins
By the end of this episode, you should have a clear framework for how BILT actually works and whether it makes sense for you. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, leave a.
- [00:41]
Jason
Comment or share it with a friend.
- [00:42]
Chris Hutchins
And if you want to keep upgrading.
- [00:43]
Jason
Your money points in life, click follow.
- [00:45]
Chris Hutchins
Or subscribe before we get into it, there is one important thing I want to address up front. I can't talk about BILT without acknowledging that they are a sponsor of this podcast, though they are not a sponsor of this episode. In fact, I don't even think they know I'm doing doing this episode.
- [01:01]
Jason
For context.
- [01:02]
Chris Hutchins
I've had the BILT card and have been a fan of BILT and Built Points for long before they became a sponsor. And that's actually why we reached out to them in the first place and why I wanted to work with them. Our relationship is pretty straightforward. They pay a fixed amount every time we run a BILT ad. I don't get paid when someone signs up. So whether all of you sign up, none of you sign up. I make the same from the partnership and I haven't agreed to anything that would prevent me from saying what I actually think about BILT and everything that they're doing right now. If I say something here that causes them to end the partnership, I would be much happier with that outcome than feeling like I couldn't actually be honest with you guys. So this is as unvarnished an opinion as I can give, and I have some very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I have never in my life spent this much time trying.
- [01:46]
Jason
To understand, model and explain a credit.
- [01:49]
Chris Hutchins
Card lineup and reward structure in my entire life. It is honestly kind of crazy. But on the other hand, for most people listening, I actually think the new.
- [01:58]
Jason
Built cards will likely be the highest.
- [02:00]
Chris Hutchins
Earning cards out there for you. But before we even get to the cards, I think it's important to talk about why the built rewards ecosystem is interesting in the first place. How it could be valuable to you.
- [02:11]
Jason
Even without the cards.
- [02:12]
Chris Hutchins
A full rundown of everything. How to earn points, how to redeem points. There's lots of different ways and then all the cards might take and the two different complicated ways that you can earn points and how to think about picking them. Remember, there are timestamps in the show notes or the description if you want to jump around. Let's start with built rewards and why I think this whole thing is even worth it and why I'm doing this episode. So I have said I think built points are the most valuable points out there. Let me explain why. And first, just benchmark this, right? If you look at other sites that have a value for points, for the most part, almost all of them either put built above everyone else, equal to everyone else, or in two edge cases, both that I'm not sure I agree with. Second to, in one case Amex and then in another case Citi and Wells Fargo, which I find a little suspect. So I want to understand Award Wallet's methodology there because I have never heard anyone say that Wells Fargo is the most valuable point currency out there. But this is not about other people's opinions. The reason I think built points are the most valuable is really twofold. One, the transfer partners they have is one of the best, if not the best, in the game. So I've been talking a little bit about how I've been building this app. I'm pulling it up right now. If you can see the screen on Spotify or YouTube and I'm looking at the transfer partners list. And if you look at this list, BILT right now has 20 transfer partners on the airline side, which is the largest of any group tied with Capital One. But the interesting thing is if I go down the list and I look at Amex, I look at Chase, I look at Capital One, I look at Wells Fargo, I look at City, and I look at what's missing. What does BILT not have? It's nothing that I'm that excited about with a couple exceptions. Aeromexico doesn't matter. Delta. I would never transfer my Amex points to Delta. The things that are standing out as potential gaps are Singapore. I've heard some people get some good use out of Singapore, especially booking their premium cabins, but not a lot. EVA air. That's one where I've seen some people talk about it being useful, but I haven't done it myself. And then Citi now adds American. So I think that is a miss. There are a lot of people that get a ton of value out of American Miles. They. They used to be a Bilt transfer partner. They're not anymore. And then maybe A and A. But the fact that A and A transfers from Amex take so long has prevented me from ever doing it. On the flip side, if you look at what Bilt does have, Bilt has Hyatt, which I think is probably the best redemption for points out there on the hotel side, maybe across airlines. And then on airlines they have United, Alaska, Japan Air, which are three kind of in my books, really coveted partners, as well as a lot of the mainstays that everyone else has. Air Canada, Air France, Avianca, Avios, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, the majority of the places, Virgin Atlantic that I want to transfer points to. Ever. Bilt has them all and they have them all at a one to one ratio. So that's the best Japan Airlines ratio out there. It beats what you get from Capital One. So love the transfer partner lineup. On the hotel side they have Hyatt, which is awesome. They have a better ratio than others for Accor, which is cool. And. And then that's kind of it. They do have IHG and Marriott and Hilton, but I never really advocate for transferring to hotel programs unless they're really outsized transfer bonuses because the value of airline miles is just so much higher than most hotel points. Except Hyatt. Do I wish they had leading hotels or preferred hotels or Choice? Not really. Maybe. But if you're getting Hyatt, you're getting Alaska, you're getting United, they are amazing. You're getting all the other mainstays. This is the best lineup.
- [05:37]
Jason
And.
- [05:37]
Chris Hutchins
And if you want to figure out how to use your points, one cool thing they do is you can actually use point Me on the website to search for availability for free. So built into the build site, you can actually see how these points work. So that's why I love built points. They have the best transfer partners. We'll talk about transfer bonuses, which in the past they've done dozens of transfer bonuses that have given you up to 150% bonus, meaning if it's normally 1 to 1, it's 1 to 2.5. And so that's been great. The points never expire. I think that makes built points amazing. The second thing is that if you don't want to play the points game, if you just like earning rewards, but you don't want to have to deal with transferring points to airlines and finding award availability, you can just use Built points in their Travel portal for 1.25 cents. Now, there are some hesitations. I always talk about using a travel portal, but they're starting to add some direct bookings. So when I search, at least on United, I see this line that says direct booking, which means unlike a lot of travel portals, where if you want to cancel something or change something, you end up having to deal with the travel portal, on direct bookings, you can actually deal directly with the airline and then you still get to redeem your points in the portal and you actually earn a bonus 1x on airlines using the build portal. So if you could just transport that built rewards program, the transfer partners the portal value, never expiring, not even needing to hold a credit card with the program to have these points, I would replace any other credit cards program with built rewards if I could. So that's why I love Bilt rewards program. And like I said, you don't even need a credit card. There are so many different ways you can earn built points without even having a credit card. So I'll kind of run through them because the whole purpose of this episode is to be kind of the de facto default guide to Bilt and how it works. And so if you look at Bilt's branding, they want to be the place for you, where you live, your neighborhood. And so they have a lot of local benefits. And so generally the way a lot of these work is you link either cards you have or other programs you have. So they have a neighborhood dining program. You can link any card, whether it's a built card or not. And at a ton of local restaurants, including a handful at, you know, non major metros, you can get 2 to 10x points at those restaurants. And sometimes there's promos as high as 10. Usually is more like 2 to 3 to 4. And so you could do that without even having a bill card. At Walgreens, you. You can link a card and you end up earning 1x on everything you do at Walgreens, whether it's a built card or not. 1x built points. And then for Walgreens products, you earn 2x points, and then you get a hundred points per prescription refill up to 26 times a year. And they've got some really interesting auto tracking for HSA and fsa. So if you log into your built account, it actually shows you on the Bilt account. Here are your HSA FSA receipts to make it easier to do reimbursements for that purpose. If you link your Lyft account, you get an extra 2x points on top of whatever you're earning from your card. It doesn't stack if you're have your link account linked somewhere else. So if your Lyft is linked to, like, Alaska, you have to unlink it to Alaska, or I guess the act of linking it to Built removes that other link. But 2x points on all lift rides, they have a bunch of fitness program partnerships. I think there's about nine of them. And so Barry's Boot Camp, Soul Cycle, Rumble, Core Power, you get an extra 2-3-x points points when you book those fitness classes. Sometimes they have promos up to 10x points. And six or seven of those fitness partners have some perks when you book through Built as a Built member, whether that's free rental shoes or free boxing gloves or a yoga mat or a water or things like that. So as you're doing things in your neighborhood around your town, that's where Built is trying to be rewarding. And again, this is not for just cardholders. This is for anyone. Like I mentioned earlier, they have a travel portal, and if you book hotels, you get plus 2x points on top of whatever you get from your card. You get plus 1x on flights, and then another 1x if you book a blade helicopter, which, you know, I think is basically New York and the south of France, so not a ton of places you can do that. And then they have this new thing called Built home Delivery, which is basically taking this company called GoPuff, which, if you've ever been to a Bevmo, funny enough, GoPuff bought Bevmo and is kind of operating mostly out of Bevmo, and they've launched this kind of integration where you can order stuff from GoPuff through Bilt and you get an extra 1x points on top of whatever's on your card. They did a partnership with Metropolis, which is a parking company. And so if you book parking in major cities with Metropolis, you get an extra 1x points. And then one of the biggest ones that I've seen a lot of people excited about is the partnership they have with Rakuten. So if you're earning cash back on rakuten, for every $0.01 on Rakuten you earn, you get one built point. Now, there's a similar partnership with Amex. You can transfer your points to Amex from Rakuten or Bilt. So the way Rakuten does this is all the cash back you accrue. And if you're not familiar with Rakuten, the way it works is you install a browser extension or use their website and you click through to tons of different retailers online and you earn cash back. Or in the case of linking to Amex or Bilt, you earn Amex or built points and then on a quarterly basis they pay out all the points you've earned either in cash back or they pay them out in points by transferring them to Amex or Built. Now prior to the Built partnership for sure I was earning Amex points because I would rather have a hundred amex points than $1. Now until the 515 quarterly payout I believe it's 515 and 2 15, the 215 and the 515 quarterly payouts. Everyone's going to get one to one and then after that starting on the 815 Rakuten payout, if you don't have any built status which we'll get to later, you get half as many points. So if I didn't have built status for sure I would just be transferring to Amex. But if you have any built status which is not too difficult to earn, especially if get one of their cards, you can transfer your racket and rewards to built. So for example, I was just looking at using our StubHub credit from our Chase Sapphire reserve card to book some Disney on Ice tickets. I saw that Racketom is doing 10% off which effectively means it's 10x points. So if you spend $400 on StubHub you would end up getting 4,000 built points. Pretty cool return. Yes, you could also get $40, but even if you're just using the travel portal that would be $50 of value. And if you transfer points I think you can go higher than that. So the Rakuten partnership is one I'm really excited about. I use Rakuten all the time. If you don't use Rakuten or you've never used it before, whether you care about build or not, definitely sign up. I think right now they still have a $50 for new user with a referral code. Mine is all thehacks.com rakuten this episode.
- [11:52]
Jason
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- [12:11]
Chris Hutchins
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- [12:12]
Jason
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- [13:54]
Chris Hutchins
Place you can earn points. I don't know if this will still exist in this new Bilt 2.0 world, so we'll find out. They used to offer referrals and so if you referred new built customers that opened up a Bilt card you would earn I believe it was 2,500 points with a 10,000 point bonus every five referrals. Up to 50 lifetime referrals. Unclear if that is still something that they're going to offer with these new cards. No one knows. We'll find out. And then you can pay your mortgage and your rent online through the Bilt platform. I think by the time this goes live. Mortgages will be live, but you've always been able to do it for rent. However, if you don't have the built cards, you will either not earn points on paying rent or mortgage or you will earn points, but you have to pay a credit card fee to put it on your credit card. And so we'll get to a lot of the points earning. But at the end of the day, there's only one exception I can think of where it might make sense to pay your rent or mortgage on BILT without the BILT card. And that is a partnership they have with Alaska Airlines where if you use a personal Alaska card, you pay a 3% fee but you get 3x points. And so if you had a card and you were trying to earn some Alaska status, not only are you effectively buying Alaska points for $0.01 each, but you are also earning some status from those cards. So I could see that making sense. Outside of that, I don't see that it makes a lot of sense to pay your rent through BILT unless you're able to earn points some other way. I'm so used to build earning points on rent that if I slip up and don't mention that you also earn it on a mortgage, it's just because it's new. Haven't actually seen that. But the way it generally works is you go into your BILT platform and you authorize some amount that you want to pay and then within some period of time, I think it's five or six days, you, you make that payment, they will give you a few different ways they can mail a check, they give you an account and routing number.
- [15:41]
Jason
That you can set up for autopay.
- [15:43]
Chris Hutchins
Or one time payments on your bank or your landlord rental website. And then I think that there's Venmo, PayPal and Zelle integrations that are supposed to be coming soon. And if you're paying rent through bill, they report that to credit bureau so could help build your credit. If you don't have a mortgage and you want to do that again on that Alaska thing, I believe it's only going to apply to rent. So. So if you're using BILT for mortgages in the future, you can't do the Alaska thing, but for rent it will last. A couple other ways to earn points, if you work with their brokerage network and you buy a home through their brokerage network, you get one point per $2 on a home. So if you bought a million dollar home, you'd get 500,000 points. I wouldn't advocate doing that as the only option. But I would definitely explore if the broker has a competitive deal and you know isn't going to cost you anything extra, then I would absolutely love to earn points. And I've heard people successfully do that. One person I know did it in the short window that MESA offered that service, earned a bunch of MESA points and of course Mesa went under. I do know that some people have found that the brokers through some of these partnerships are not any worse than going on your own. So if you can do that and earn points, all the better. If you do live at a Built alliance property, which means you rent from a rental property that is part of that network, there are all kinds of other ways to earn points. They might give you incentives for signing a lease, renewing a lease, all kinds of things like that. And then for the Built Rewards program, as you're earning points, you are now also earning this other currency called Built Cash, which I'll talk about later. But for every 25,000 points you earn across all of these methods and from your card, you also earn Built Cash. And we'll get to that. So again, this is all the stuff you can do without a built card, which is unlike almost any other points currency, right? There's not an easy way to to earn AMEX or Chase points other than having a Chase card. And yes, some of them have shopping portals or the Amex Rack and transfer. But none of the programs I'm aware of have as many ways to earn points as a non member or even as a member as built. And given how valuable the points are, it's just great. Like if I have an option to earn some other point or built points, I'm going to earn the built points as long as I'm earning more points. So that's how to earn points. How do you redeem points? So I've talked all about the transfer partners, but let's run through the other options. You can redeem your points for rent or statement credits, but best I can understand, you get about 0.55 cents per point. So about half a cent per point. Not a great option. I would not encourage you to do that. Funny enough, I saw this thing from Amex that said the top ways that Amex customers redeem their Amex points, this is across all the membership rewards ecosystem was like gift cards, statement credits and like a third option that was equally as bad. Like all of us that are using our points in ways that are super valuable. Well, the reason we're able to do that is because it turns out the top three redemption methods across all of Amex, I think it was Amex travel. But the top three redemption methods include two of the worst. And so I guess letting them go to waste would be the worst. But they include some bad options, so don't use the bad options. Other things you can do, you can redeem built points for Lyft Amazon gift cards. Those are at about.07 cents. Sometimes they bonus those up. Maybe they get up to 1 cent, but for the most part, not a great value. There's a built collection, which is kind of like a built shop for various home goods and art and stuff like that. The value is sometimes okay, but the price of the items is not. So I haven't found any good value there. So those are all the things I don't do. Things that I think have decent or great value. So if you pay off student loans through Bilt, you can do that for one cent a point. Now, I don't have student loans right now to pay them off and I think there are better options. But $0.01 a point is something where it's like just on the cusp. I'm okay with $0.01. Obviously more is better, but $0.01 is not terrible. If you book something in the travel portal, you get 1.25 cents, which I think is a good redemption value. And then if you make a down payment with your built points best I understand, and I could be wrong here, you get one and a half cents, which sounds like a great value. And then transferring to partners, I think yes, you could do terribly. Oftentimes I'm getting one and a half to two cents each. So I think that can be a really, really great option as well. But I mentioned earlier that sometimes they have these great transfer bonuses and they all end up happening on the first of the month, which is what Bilt calls rent day. And so on the 1st of the month, they do a bunch of different types of promotions throughout the year. They have done comedy, dining, fitness experiences. They have a game you can play in the app. They give you boosted redemption value, sending to Lyft or Amazon and doing credits like that, special access to tickets, free berries and soul cycle classes, all kinds of stuff like that. And then two other things that they've been doing consistently and somewhat inconsistently, so consistently up until February 1st. So a couple days before this episode comes out, a couple days after I'm recording it, which given how much Bilt's been changing everything, I'm recording this on January 27th, they've done a double points promotion on Rent Day. So it used to be double points on all your spend, then they capped it and then they lowered the cap. And so up until the transition to the new cards, anytime you spend on Rent Day, you get double points up until you earn a thousand bonus points. And so if you're spending on a 1x category, you'd get 2x points on $1,000. But if you were spending on a 2x category, you'd get 4x points on $500 and then 3x would be 6x points on $333. And so that is uncertain if it's happening. I think at best maybe, and at my expectation is not continuing. Okay, I'm jumping in here three days after I recorded this episode because there's already an update and it's actually pretty good.
- [21:17]
Jason
So Bilt announced that the double points promo from Rent Day will continue for all the new cards until the 1st of January, 2027. Built cash and housing points will not be doubled, but whatever you earn on your cards is up to the same thousand bonus points we've been getting with the Bilt card in the past. So that means if you've got a.
- [21:35]
Chris Hutchins
Palladium card, you, you're going to get.
- [21:36]
Jason
4X points on your first $500 every first of the month.
- [21:40]
Chris Hutchins
But the big one is these transfer bonuses. And so I looked back, since they did their first one, December 1, 2020, two of the 39 months that followed, including February 1, 2026, 20 of the 39 months, there's been a transfer bonus. And so about half of them last year in 2025, eight of the 12 months had transfer bonuses, so about two thirds. And, and so if you look last year, the upper end of the transfer Bonus was always 100% bonus. In fact, one time it was Hilton and it was a 200% bonus. So keep in mind, a 200% bonus is like going from 1 to 1 to 1 to 300% would be going from 1 to 1 to 1to 2. And so unlike a lot of the other transfer bonuses you see from Amex, you see from Chase, you see from capital one, it's like 10, 15, 25, 30%. These go up to 100%. And so if you're able to time your redemptions and do your planning on those days, and you usually get five or six days notice of what that transfer bonus is going to be, there can be some really, really lucrative options. So the way those typically work is that you need some level of status in order to get the highest bonus. So it might be a 25% bonus for no status or blue status, which is what everyone gets. 50% silver, 75% gold, 100% platinum. I will talk later in this episode about how to get those statuses. But one of the cool things they're adding with this new program is that one of the uses of your Built Cash, which again, every 25,000 points you earn, you get $50 of built cash, is that you can use that Built Cash to unlock higher transfer bonuses. It's not entirely clear how that will work. They gave one example of how it will work on February 1st. I think you need $75 of built cash to unlock the highest tier bonus, which for February 1st is going to a core. So I think it was up to 100% bonus, and then you can get 125% bonus if you cash in $75 of built cash. Unfortunately, no one really has a lot of Built Cash. As of this year, the only way to earn Built Cash was to earn 25,000 points. So unless you've already earned 25,000 points in January, you wouldn't have enough Built Cash. And by the way, 25,000 points would earn you $50. So you need to have earned 50, 50,000 points from your Built Card in January to have Built Cash. So it's a little weird that they're doing this promo February 1st, which requires built Cash when I'm guessing most people don't have any Build Cash yet. That said, in the future, one of the great things is Platinum Status was always so coveted because you've got these insane transfer bonuses. Now you'll just be able to use your Built Cash to be able to buy into those transfer bonuses, which I think's pretty cool. So that is what happens with Rent Day. So let's talk about status. You either earn status with BILT by the number of points you earn or the dollars you spend. So on points earned, it's kind of all the points you earn from housing, from shopping in neighborhood places, from transfers from rakuten, everything. The only thing that's excluded are kind of free points, things you get from referrals or courtesy stuff or promos and then the dollar spent. It's everything you spend on a Built card or on linked cards, doing a lot of those neighborhood things like taking a lift ride or parking or booking in the travel portal. So you choose either method. You don't even have to choose. Whichever one you hit first is what counts. And so Silver Status comes after earning 50,000 points or after spending $10,000 on your built card or linked cards, Gold status comes from 125,000 points earned or $25,000 spent, and Platinum status comes from 200,000 points earned or $50,000 spent. So note these things could change, but that's generally how it works. The reason I cared about status as I mentioned was often for these transfer bonuses. The fact that you can now use built cash to buy up to different levels of the bonuses means that maybe earning the highest tier of status isn't as necessary or as rewarding as it once was. Given that you have some other alternatives. As for what these status tiers earn you, when you get to silver status, which is not technically the lowest status because that would be blue status, which is what everyone has, you start to unlock a ton of benefits. So the first one you get the increased transfer bonuses and then you unlock one to one Rakuten transfers. So starting in I think August 15, you'll need some level of status, silver, gold or platinum to unlock those one to one transfers. I think silver status will be easier to get with the new cards, but we'll get to that. Other things you get are you earn interest on your points, but I will point out that the interest you earn is very minimal based on the national savings rate, which right now is 0.39%, which means that if you have a hundred thousand built points, you would earn 390 points a year. You get virgin voyages blue extras status match, which means you can status match to their status. I haven't taken a virgin voyages, I haven't needed to do this. You get 10% off blade flights and when you transfer points from built to airlines and hotels, the minimum which is normally 2000 points gets lowered to a thousand. So not a ton of benefits here. The biggest ones would be increased transfer bonuses and the one to one rakuten. When you get to the gold level, you unlock three things and one is home away from home luxury hotel benefits. So there are a ton of programs out there to book luxury hotels and get perks. You can do it at find hotels and resorts. With Amex you can do it with the Chase, the edit collection. Capital One has one, Citi has one. You can go to hotels. All the hacks.com use the password perks and book it with us. All of these programs have access to some networks. It looks like the built network is virtuoso. I think probably built Chase, Capital One are smaller. Amex and the all the hack site are much bigger networks of luxury hotels and you get things like free breakfast, hotel credits, upgrades, early check in, late checkout, that kind of stuff. Great. If you're booking those properties, I encourage everyone to use a program, but there are programs like what we've built that are free and so this is a benefit, but I wouldn't consider it something that is that exciting. If you want to buy a home at the gold level, you get a homeownership, concierge. I don't know what that is. Sounds like they will help walk you through the process of buying a home. And then you get access to the Blade Lounges and maybe just the Blade Lounge in New York even when you're not flying. I've been to the lounge. It is not that exciting. It's all the way on the west side Highway. I think it's at 34th street ish. So the benefits of gold not that exciting other than your transfer bonus gets leveled up. And I believe when you use Built Cash in the future to increase your transfer bonuses on rent day, you might be limited sometimes to only one level. So the biggest benefit to gold is increased transfer bonuses and the ability to buy up to the platinum level.
- [28:16]
Jason
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Starting something new is exciting, but it's also full of what ifs. When I went full time on this podcast, I had plenty of them.
- [28:25]
Chris Hutchins
What if this doesn't work?
- [28:26]
Jason
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- [29:25]
Chris Hutchins
Not because you're bad at it, but.
- [29:27]
Jason
Because it never really stops. Clarity is what helps drive you forward when everything keeps coming at you. That's what Superhuman is built for, turning your inbox into momentum. So email feels structured instead of chaotic. I've used Superhuman for years and what I appreciate most is that it removes a lot of the small decisions that usually slow email down. Once your inbox is organized, autodrafts help make sure nothing stalls. If an email needs a response, autodrafts can remind you to follow up and even draft the reply for you. So things keep moving and nothing slips through the cracks. For me, Auto Archive is what keeps everything feeling calm and focused. It learns what I don't need to see and it clears it out automatically, which keeps my inbox centered on the few things that actually matter. Instead of constantly triaging email, I can open my inbox and it already feels calm. The result is that email becomes a system I trust, something that supports my day instead of interrupting it. Turn your inbox into momentum Sign up for Superhuman mail today at allthehacks.com superhuman that's allthehacks.com superhuman now at the Platinum.
- [30:34]
Chris Hutchins
Level, there are some benefits that I think are really interesting. The main ones are you get a free blade ride. So to take a helicopter, which I took advantage of last year from JFK or Newark into the city or vice versa, you do that once a year for free. So that's a cool benefit. You can also status match to Air France to their Gold level of status after you make a 10,000 point transfer to Air France. Really interesting. You can repeat it so it's not a one time thing. Air France Gold status is SkyTeam Elite plus which is their highest tier of SkyTeam status. Though I will say within Sky Team status is less exciting than with Star alliance or One World. But getting Sky Team status like Air France Gold would let you pick some premium seats on Delta or maybe get a free check bag without having to have a Delta card. So there's definitely some value to having that status if you're flying on any of the Sky Team carriers. And if you're going for Air France Platinum status, which is something I'm intrigued by but haven't decided to go to, this really helps give you a big head start. You also are supposed to get a complimentary built collection gift. I never got one when I hit Platinum status. And then if you want a status match to Virgin Voyages, you get Virgin Voyages Deep Blue Extras status. Haven't done that. Can't speak to that. Platinum's the highest tier. Unclear if these benefits change over time, but that's kind of the things you can unlock as you earn. So that's built status. So I think we kind of recapped the entire built ecosystem, excluding cards and earning points on housing payments. So now let's come back to that. And it's definitely where things get really complicated. Definitely over complicated. There are three things that need to be explained. There are the built cards, and then there's built secondary currency, which is built cash. And then you get, as a cardholder, two different methods by which you can earn points on your housing payments. These things are all interconnected, which is why I probably spent far too long today trying to figure out which is the right order to talk about them in this episode. But I think I landed on talking about the built cards, then the built cash, and then how you earn points on housing payments. And then we kind of wrap up and do a little analysis of it all at the end on how good the cards are. Once you put together all of the information. Again, timestamps, you can skip around if you want. And for some context, for people that aren't familiar, the old built card was a little bit more straightforward. You had the built card, you got 1x points on all your rent. That capped out at a hundred thousand points a year. So you could only make one rent payment. So if you had $8,333.33 rent, that would kind of perfectly cap you out at a hundred thousand a year. And the only requirement was have a built card and make five transactions a month. From all the reports you can go read, I think the Wall Street Journal did a pretty big expose. It was like Wells Fargo was funding this and losing a ton of money. It's obvious that couldn't continue. That's probably the reason why the cards are transitioning from Wells Fargo to cardless. And so if you think of that as your expectation, then you'll probably be disappointed because you're not going to get a hundred thousand points for making five transactions. That's just not how it works in this new card world. You pay your rent or mortgage through bilt, and the number of points you earn is based on which earning program you choose. There's two options, and then how much you spend on the card, and then a few other things that make this way more complicated than it needs to be. I will say, when I think about this, one of the biggest things I've heard from other people is, oh my gosh, if my rent is now $5,000, they're like, now I have to spend $5,000 a month to unlock all these rent points that I used to get. It is true that if you want the full number of points you used to get, you now need to spend a lot. But it is also true that if you have $5,000 of rent and you only spend $2,500 on the card, it's not that you're not getting any points, it's more like you get these bonus points on all of your spend on your card up to the amount of money that you spend on housing. And I'll break it down a little bit further, but I want you to kind of separate the old world and the new world and realize that I think these cards look better if you objectively look at them compared to other cards than they do if you compare them to the old built cards. Now, that assumes you can figure out how they all work. And so I'm going to try to help you do that. So there are three cards and they are all issued by a combo of built cardless and then column na, which is the underlying bank. And if you're already a built customer, by the time you're listening this, you've probably already picked a card because you had up until January 30th to pick a new card without a hard inquiry on your credit. They just did a soft pull after January 30th or now for those listening, you could still get the card if you didn't before. And if you're not a cardholder, you can get the card. But just like every other card you apply for, you're going to have a hard inquiry on your credit. That's just how applying for credit works, except in the rare circumstance where I guess a bank transitions cards and portfolios and then they don't have to do that. So whatever card you pick when you apply, and I don't know exactly how it works, but I know you could apply for a card and, and then if you don't get it, you can pick a different card. But once you pick your card, they have said that after a year you can change, but within the first year, built has said you can't change the card. And so let's jump into the card options. So the first card is the built blue card. It's a no annual fee card. It has no foreign transaction fees, and you earn 1x points on everything. Now, I'm going to skip over how it earns points on housing because all three of the cards earn points on your housing payments the same way. And there are two options, so I'm not going to cover those in each individual card. Right now, the welcome bonus for signing up for this card is $100 of Bilt Cash, which I'm going to say is worth probably not that much. Definitely not $100, despite built efforts at saying Biltcash is dollar for dollar worth what it says and we'll get to what it's actually worth. I would not think of this as a $100 signup bonus. I would think of it as less than that. And we'll get to why Other benefits of the blue card you get cell phone protection, purchase assurance, master rental coverage, and mastercard's World Elite benefits. There's a ton of stuff in there. This is not the episode where I'm going to deep dive on it. There is a guide to benefits on the website if you want to dive into all of them. The only real selling point I can give you for the blue card is that there are no annual fees. A 1x points card is not exciting to me even when you stack in all the other things, because I would rather just have a 2x points card then have a 1x points card that also has all these other complicated ways to earn points and rewards on housing and all this kind of stuff. Now, if it was the only card you could get and you had a ton of points in the built ecosystem and you really love the transfer bonuses, maybe that would make sense. When I applied for the Palladium card, which I'll get to in a moment, I was denied and told I could only have the blue card and it wasn't an obvious yes. Fortunately, Bilt kind of retweaked all of the credit scoring algorithm and sent everyone an email out a few days later. And it sounds like a lot of the people that got denied got re approved. And so I did get approved for the Palladium card, so I never had to make that call. But I was definitely not confident that it was worth getting the built blue card as my only card option right now. So that's, I guess, how I think about that card. But if you really want to be a part of the built ecosystem, you want to earn some build status and you're just, I don't know, morally against annual fees, I guess it would be your only option. The next card is the Built Obsidian card and it's a $95 annual fee card, no foreign transaction fees. And it's the most similar to the old built card in that you get 1x on everyday spend, 2x on travel, and 3x on dining or grocery. And the nuance here is the dining spend is uncapped, but the grocery spend is capped at $25,000 a year. And if people are wondering, I think the most obvious reason that the grocery spend is capped is that there are a lot of ways that people buy gift cards at grocery stores and see spend a ton. And I think $25,000 was probably what Bilt felt was reasonable for grocery spend, but would kind of set a limit for people who wanted to play the gift card game really hard. That's my assumption. One other thing on the travel I learned the hard way that bilt2x travel is not all travel. It's definitely hotels and flights and rental cars. But I did make a large travel agency purchase at one point and it did not earn the full 2x. And so I would definitely kind of read the terms or maybe even ask Bilt if you were going to make a really large purchase and you were uncertain. The signup bonus right now and the welcome bonus is 200 of built cash. Again, not a very exciting welcome bonus. And then the benefits are the same as the blue except you also get a $52 time a year hotel credit only on two night minimum stays. And so that effectively means twice a year you get a $25 a night credit on two night stays that you book through the built portal. There's probably some value to this benefit and I think the primary reason they probably did this benefit is because they could call it 50 times 2, which is a hundred, which is greater than the annual fee. But if I asked anyone listening whether they would pay a hundred dollars to get a $50 credit towards a two night stay, I am almost certain that no one would pay face value for that. So for me that's a credit that I would expect. If I had this card I would probably never be able to use. Maybe I would use it, but it would certainly not be something I'm prioritizing. I've got much larger hotel credits for collections like the edit and I still haven't been able to use those. However, it does appear that you don't have to book super luxury hotels with this credit. So it might be easier to use than other hotel credits that you have on other cards. But at the end of the day, $25 a night is not a huge credit and I would probably just book directly with the hotel for that difference. Now other benefits you get with the Obsidian card that you don't get with the blue card are trip cancellation and interruption protection, trip delay reimbursement, and extended warranty coverage. When I look at this card it feels very similar to a Chase Sapphire Preferred same annual fee with the perk that you could swap dining for groceries. I think there are a lot of people who spend a lot on dining or groceries and travel. And so this is an interesting card if you don't want to spend a lot on an annual fee and you like the built ecosystem, especially because I'll talk about how I think you'll probably earn anywhere from 1 to 1.3x extra points on top of all of this from what you get to unlock with your housing spend. And so this is interesting for a lot of people. That said, it's pretty disappointing for a card that competes with cards like the Chase. Sapphire preferred to offer a welcome bonus of about $200 a bill cash. I would say if I had to put a value on that, it would be somewhere around 6 to 7,000 points worth of built cash. So I can't imagine ever seeing another card issuer be like, hey, we're launching a new credit card with a 7,000 point signup bonus. It seems crazy. So the welcome bonus on this card is not that exciting, but it does unlock a lot of rewards. And so if you do not like high annual fees or you spend a ton on dining or groceries maybe, but that's capped. I could see it being interesting, but the card that I think is the most interesting is the built Palladium card and it does have a high annual fee of $495. So I think that's where people might kind of have a little bit of an allergic reaction to it. But hear me out. So no foreign transaction fees and then 2x on everyday spend. Now, I don't say 2x on everything because if you read the terms, there are some things that are excluded. A lot of things that most companies exclude, like cash, like transactions, cash advances, balance transfers, but also gambling, crypto and then a few things that are a little bit not normal. Gift cards and tax payments. Now, it is not clear whether these are things that are on a list that don't get enforced or whether these things are actively going to be not earning points. There are other cards like the Robinhood and US bank cards that do not earn points on a lot of these categories. Ebay is a bit strange. I haven't seen that one before. But it wouldn't surprise me if you don't earn points on tax payments and crypto funding and gambling and all that kind of stuff. But it's possible you would, but I wouldn't expect it with this card. Benefits are very similar to the Obsidian card, except you also get a priority pass lounge membership, which if you don't have elsewhere is interesting, but if you're like me and you have three or four of them is kind of a useless extra Perk. You get $200 of built cash every year. And so again, 6,7000 points of value, I'm not going to say no to that. That's probably a hundred dollars. So I'm excited, but it's not that exciting. Instead of getting mastercard World El benefits, you get mastercard World Legend benefits. I haven't looked too much into the mastercard World Legend program, but there's probably some extra benefits there that are maybe interesting. It definitely includes baggage delay, lost or damaged luggage, and price drop protection. And then the other one is a $200 twice a year hotel credit. Now, similar to the built Obsidian card, it requires a two night minimum stay. But unlike a $50 credit, this is a $200 credit and it doesn't require really expensive hotels. So if you were looking to stay somewhere and it was a two night stay at let's say 150 bucks a night, $300, this would let you take $200 off that. This credit actually feels way more reasonable to use. In fact, when I look at a credit like the ones on the edit or fine hotels and resorts, they might be 250 or $300 credits, but almost every hotel they have on those programs, you're lucky if you find one under $500. Many times they're over a thousand dollars and they're only four or five star hotels. So it makes it really hard to use a 250 credit. If the only hotels you can use it at are a thousand dollars and you didn't even want to spend a thousand dollars in the first place. This credit actually feels like it might be able to be used a little better. You could think of it as a hundred dollars a night off because it needs a two night minimum stay. You get two a year. And so that is kind of $400 right there. Obviously I wouldn't buy these credits for $400 because there is some hassle of having to use them, having to book through the portal, having to stay at a hotel. But I do think there's more value there where the value I think gets made up for out the gate for this card is that it's the only card with a compelling welcome bonus. You get 50,000 built points and you get built gold status after spending $4,000 in three months. So yes, there are higher welcome bonuses out there. There are not higher welcome bonuses on cards that earn as much as this. Card does only because when you look at housing payments and Built Cash and you bundle it all together, I think this card earns more than every other card out there. And I'll run into why. You also get a welcome bonus of 300 build cash. So you get 50,000 points gold status after spending 4,000 in three months and then $300 build cash. So my takeaway here is this card feels very similar to a venture X. It's 2X everywhere with a couple exclusions, but it has the upside of more valuable points and then the ability to unlock a ton of value on your housing payments. It does have a higher annual fee and slightly harder to use credits. But I think when you look at it all together, if I had to pick whether I wanted to keep holding a Venture X or Palladium and they were my only options, it would definitely be the Palladium card. So if you think the built cards make sense for you, then I think picking a card ultimately comes down to the Obsidian or the Palladium. But at the end of the day, you're going to have to ask yourself, do I spend enough on dining and grocery that the Obsidian makes sense. However, in the first year, the Palladium would cost an extra $400 in annual fees, but you would get 50,000 points. 300 in built cash. Let's call that about 10,000 points. So 60,000 points and definitely a more usable hotel credit and some other things that may or may not be useful to you. Built status priority pass. So let's ignore the hotel credit, right? Let's ignore the build status. Let's ignore all the perks and just say you get an extra 60,000 points and let's value those points at 1.25 cents. Okay? And so if they're valued at 1.25 cents, you would need 32,000 of them to offset the extra $400 annual fee. So let's say 60,000 points. We subtract 32,000, you're left with 28,000 points. So, effectively, for the first year, you could argue that this card is a 28,000point welcome bonus on a 95 annual fee. And that makes it easy to compare apples to apples with the Obsidian. Well, if you chose grocery, you couldn't even earn those 28, 000 points because the spend on the 3x is capped at 25, 000. So the only way you could earn more points in the first year is with the Obsidian card. And that's if you've spent a ridiculous amount of money on dining, meaning over $28,000 on dining and you spend nothing on non dining, non travel spend which on the Obsidian card is going to earn 1x. So another way of saying all this is I can't make a case to get any card other than the Palladium card unless the welcome bonus changes, which, based on how quickly things have been changing, might happen before this episode even comes out. Which is why I got the Palladium card now after one year, I'm not making that same case, but given the welcome bonus that only exists at that level on the Palladium card, I think that welcome bonus more than makes up for the annual fee difference. And so for me and for I think a lot of people looking at this, it would be worth it to get the Palladium card for year one and then decide whether you spend enough in that everything else category that 2x on that category makes sense, or whether you really spend a lot more that getting 3x on dining or grocery, 2x on travel and 1x and everything else makes sense.
- [47:39]
Jason
This episode is brought to you by Whisper Flow. I love saving time, especially when I'm at my desk so I can get stuff done faster, which is why I'm a huge fan of Whisper Flow.
- [47:49]
Chris Hutchins
And you've got to check it out.
- [47:50]
Jason
It turns your voice into clean final draft writing inside whatever apps you're already using, email, Slack, docs on Mac, Windows and iPhone. Here's why I love it. Your income comes from high leverage work, negotiating, closing, building, but your time always disappears into replies and admin work. With Flow, I hit a hotkey speak and the text appears fast and accurate so I can clear the inbox, craft thoughtful replies and get back to the real work. Also, it learns how you write names, acronyms, tone and even works when you whisper so you don't have to bother people around you. On iPhone, it appears as a keyboard. Open any app, tap start Flow or use the action button like I do. Talk and it's done. It's so fast. And best of all, you can try it free@WhisperFlow AI AllTheHacks. That's WhisperFlow AI/AllTheHacks links in the description.
- [48:46]
Chris Hutchins
Thank you so much for being here today.
- [48:48]
Jason
You can find all the links, promo codes and discounts from our partners@AllTheHacks.com deals. These are brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us.
- [49:02]
Chris Hutchins
Ultimately, getting any of these cards doesn't really give you outsized value over what else is in the market unless you start factoring in these Housing payments. So let's talk about this because it is so confusing. I had to make a spreadsheet, and then I remade it, and someone emailed me and said, hey, could I have a copy of it? And I was like, no, no, no, you don't need it. It's actually simple. And then as I was prepping for this episode, I realized, nope, it was more complicated than I thought. At launch, there was just one way to do this. You earned 4% built cash, and you could use your built cash to effectively unlock points when you make your housing payments. Now, there is an option. It is a simpler option, but I'm not actually sure it's better. And so I had a proposal that I unsolicitedly sent to bilt, which I thought made things so much easier, which was when you make your housing payments with Bilt, you earn an extra 1x points on any of your BILT cards on all your spend up until the amount you spend on your housing payments, full stop. That's it. No tiers, no built cash. I think the economics of that outcome would have been very similar in terms of what it would cost them to reward, maybe even less. And it would have been so straightforward, they did not take my unsolicited advice. So here are the options that you do have, which, by the way, you can change every single statement cycle and it kicks in the next statement cycle. And so option one, you earn points on your housing payments based on how much you spend in that same billing cycle. So there's no built cash earned here. The only built cash you're going to get is from your welcome offer or your annual bonuses, or that every 25,000 points you earn, you get $50 of bill cash. So you don't pay a transaction fee when you pay your rent or mortgage. And then depending on what percent of your housing spend you do is how many points you get. So if you spend less than 25% of your housing payment, meaning if your housing payment is $4,000 a month, if in that month you spend less than $1,000, you just get the floor, which is 250 points a month. If you spend 25% or more, you get 5x points, which, this is where it gets confusing. So if you have a $4,000 monthly payment and you pay 25% of it, or $1,000, you end up getting 2,000 points a month, which is 0.5x on the 4,000. So in that scenario, you'd actually be spending a thousand dollars a month on the card and you'd be getting whatever points you get on the card plus 2000 points. So that's a plus 2x on your spend. So that's definitely the highest ROI in terms of getting plus 2x points on your spend, but it caps out at one quarter of your housing payments. Then if you spend 50% of your housing, you get 0.75x, which turns out is plus 1.5x on all your spend, which means if you have a Palladium card earning 2x and you spend 50% of your housing on it, you're going to get an additional 1.5x on all your spend because you're getting 0.75x on your housing spend. I know this is confusing. The way mathematically is you take the point 75x you earn on your housing and you divide it by 0.5. So then if you spend 75% of your housing, so if your housing payment is $4,000 a month, and you spend $3,000 a month on your card, you earn 1x points on housing. So 4,000 points, 4,000 points over the 3,000 you spend to get it 1 plus 1.33x. And then it caps out at if you spend 100% of your housing or more, you just get 1.25x your housing payment, which is 1.25x your spend, because you're spending your housing payment or more. Now, obviously, if you're spending 150% of your housing, it doesn't end up being 1.25x because the denominator becomes bigger. So spending anything above one of these thresholds starts to diminish until you get to the next level. So if you were to spend 99.9% of your monthly housing costs, so if you had a $4,000 mortgage payment and you spent $3,999.99, you would only get the 1x points on your housing payment, not the 1.25, which effectively makes it plus 1x on all your spend. Whereas if you spent one more penny, you'd get 1.25x on all your spend. I think at this point you're understanding why this is so complicated and how it got confusing. If you end up spending three times your housing, the average ROI is plus.417x on your spend. So the short version here is, in a strange way, the less you spend relative to your housing, the higher your multiple on your spend is. But obviously, the less points you get. But if you spend your monthly housing amount, $4,000 rent, you spend 4,000amonth, you're going to get whatever the card earns plus 1.25x. So on a Palladium card, it's a 3.25x card. If you spend right at those thresholds of 75, 50 or 25, it's actually better. And if you spend somewhere in between, it's somewhere in between. Now, you don't earn any extra built cash on this option, so there's not really any incentive to spend beyond 100% of your housing payment. Obviously, it's still, if you had the Palladium card, a 2x card, and so there's probably not a ton of other cards you could use that are better. So I'm not saying you wouldn't want to spend more than your housing payment, but all of the housing payment return goes away with option one once you hit 100%. So simple example, which simple is just hysterical when I talk about this. If your rent's $4,000 a month and you want to max your points, you want to spend $4,000 a month and you'll end up getting 5,000 points because you get 1.25x. If you had the Bill Palladium card, you'd get 8,000 points from spending 4,000, and then you'd get 5,000 points from your rent payment. So that's 13,000 points on 4,000 spend, which is 3.25x. So 3.25x card is awesome. What other card gives 3.25x on all your spending? I don't know of any of them out there, so that's what gets me really exciting about this. However, you have to spend that each month. So if Instead of spending $4,000 a month, let's say you spend $20,000 in one month, maybe you have to make a big tuition bill or something, and then the next four months you spend nothing. And then you would get those 5,000 points that first month, but then every subsequent month you would just get 250 points because you didn't meet the spend thresholds. So you need to be consistently spending for this option to make sense. Now, there's supposed to be a progress tracker in the app that helps make sure you do this right. It seems to all get reconciled at the end of the month. That's option one. Option two, which at face value seems more straightforward, I think when you dig in is more complicated, but it's the option they started with, which is that you just earn 4% back in built cash on all the built cards and then you have to use your Built Cash for a bunch of different options. The marquee one being you can use it to unlock points on your housing payments. Now, the way they market it is you can use $30 of built cash to unlock 1000 points on your housing payments. So if you had a $4,000 housing payment and you wanted to unlock the full 4,000 points because you're capped at 1x, you would need to have $120 of built cash to do that. So this is one of the reasons why I think they're giving a welcome bonus of Build Cash is so that you can start the month off with enough built cash to be able to earn points on your housing payments before you start spending on the card. Because you do need the built cash in your account to unlock those housing payments when you make the payment. However, that ratio of $30 of built cash to a thousand points, that's not actually a thing, it's just an example. Basically, you could $3 of built cash for 100 points. You could do any kind of metric there. Basically, you're buying points with your built cash for $0.03 each, up to however many points your housing payment is. So you can look at that and say 4% built cash, but you got to buy the points at $0.03 each. It's kind of like earning 1.33x points, except it's capped on earning 1x on housing, which again, this is why I think this is so complicated. But the kind of tight way to say this would be you earn 1.33x extra points on all your spend up to 75% of your monthly housing payments. So if you spend $4,000 a month on housing payments on option 2, you only have to spend $3,000 to max out those points. But you're only going to get 1x on that. So 4,000 points. Now, 4,000 points on 3,000 spend is an extra 1.33x. Stack that with 2x on the Palladium card, you're at a 3.33x card. That's really exciting. But it's only up to 75% of your housing payments versus in option one, you would get 3.25x but up to 100% of your housing payments. So the total number of points you'd earn is more, but the multiple on them is slightly less. Now, the good thing here is that if in one month you were to spend 15, $20,000 and earn a lot of built cash, then for the next four months you might have enough built cash banked to earn points on Your rent or mortgage, which without having to spend in those months. That is, unless it's towards the end of the year where all your built cash except $100 expires at the end of the year. I told you this is complicated, right? Don't worry. By the end of this, I'm going to try to simplify what you should do. But yeah, this is wild. So with that $4,000 rent example, in this option two, you have two options to kind of max things out. If you only spend $3,000, you earn $120 of built cash. At 4%. That's enough built cash to unlock the full 4,000 points on your $4,000 of rent. But let's say you spend the full $4,000 to make this apples to apples to what you would have spent in option one to earn the most points. Well, now you're going to earn $160 of build cash. You'll still unlock 4,000 points on rent, but you'll have $40 of built cash left over. So ultimately, what is that $40 of built cash worth and would you rather have it or would you rather have an extra thousand points? And that really comes down to how you value built points, how you value built cash. The way I'll describe this is built points should probably be worth one to one and a half cents, which means that a thousand built points is probably worth somewhere between 10 and $15. So what is $40 of built cash worth? You could argue it's worth somewhere between 10 and $15. I'm just going to round and say in my mind, built cash when considering the trade off between option one and two is worth a third of what it says it is. So if it says it's $30 a bill cash, in my mind, it's $10. Now, how are you going to redeem this bill cash? Because that is where this kind of all comes together. If you follow built marketing, you'd be really excited because they say true dollar for dollar value, which is probably legally true. But I would never buy $1,000 of build cash for anywhere close to $1,000 if someone were selling it. And so let me walk through the redemption options and there are a lot, so bear with me. Some of these are available probably by the time you hear this episode. Some of them are going to launch on March 1st. And I'm sure that over time they will change and more will come out. I am looking at this thinking not about how much is this worth in terms of what is the dollar value, but how much would I buy this for? And I'm kind of mentally benchmarking would I buy this for more or less than 1/3 of its stated value As I think about the two options I just talked about. So one of them you get up to $120 a year of Grubhub credit in the form of $10 a month. Is this worth 1/3 of $10 or $3.33? Well, I have an Amex Gold card that gets $10 of Grubhub credit a month and I don't use it every month. I would never buy it for probably any amount because I don't even use it. So to me this is not a thing I would use. Getting $5 a month of built home delivery credit via GoPuff not going to use getting $100 a year towards the GoPuff fam membership not going to use There used to be a ton of GoPuff credits on Chase. I never ended up using all of those. There are some people out there who I'm sure will find a ton of value out of some of these things that I don't. But to me none of those options for Built Cash are ones I would probably use or value at much. Now $300 a year of restaurant credit at Built Dining partners capped at $25 a month and one visit a month is possibly interesting. We're still talking about small dollars, but there are a lot of Built Dining restaurants that I go to regularly. I don't know which ones of them will be ones I can use this Built Cash at. If restaurants I'm already going to once a month I could cash out $25 a built cash app. That's pretty interesting. I probably wouldn't pre buy that for $25, but I'd probably buy it for more than $8. If it's restaurants I'm already going to, you can get $50 a month $600 a year towards Built Dining experience bookings. They've had a ton of these on rent days. They seem to all be very limited in major metros. Not something that I've ever taken advantage of. But if I lived in a city and went out to dinner at 7:30 or 8, you know, maybe I would use these, but I've never taken advantage of them before so I assume I will not get any use out of those. You get more hotel credits. So on stays of up to two nights booked in the Built Travel Portal, Blue and Silver status members get up to $50 a month and Gold and Platinum members get up to $100 a month of built credit. So the one reason why I think I might use this a little is that it can be combined with the built hotel credit from the Built Palladium card or the Obsidian card. So if you wanted to stack those, you could say I've got a $150 a night, two night stay, $300 total I could use if I had gold or Platinum status, $100 of built cash plus the $200 credit from the credit card and make that a $0 stay. So I'd probably use this twice a year to complement the credits I'm using from the Palladium card. Beyond that, I'm not sure it's effectively $50 a night off once a month. I definitely don't stay at hotels every month, so it's certainly not something I'd use a lot of. So I'm kind of saying maybe I'd use it twice a year. One of the options unlocking higher transfer bonuses. So they gave an example of $75 of built cash letting someone who's gold get the platinum bonus. If I weren't already platinum. This is interesting, but I am. So I probably wouldn't use that $10 a month lift credits. I don't use my Chase $10 a month lift credits most months, so I would probably use two or three months. So maybe there's some value here, but it's not a ton. If you took Lyft rides weekly, which I did five, 10 years ago, this might be a lot more interesting. The black lane credits I think are actually a little different. So depending on your status. Blue, silver, it's $50 a year, gold, it's $100 a year, and platinum, it's $150 a year at the platinum level. Best I understand Black lane is kind of like uber black competitor. And for a lot of rides that might be $40, a black lane might be $100. So maybe you're paying 2x. You're also getting a nicer experience. I think if you use it at an airport, it's someone waiting a baggage claim with a name on a board versus calling it and waiting for the car walking across the street. So $150 of credit is probably enough for, you know, a longer airport or longer ride. And to get that, if I'm thinking In terms of 1/3 for $50, I think I'd probably use that. Like I think that there are probably circumstances I could see airport in New York, maybe flying into dulles, going into D.C. airports that are kind of far away. If you had 100, $120 ride, using your built cash to bring that down, I think could have some value. Similarly, you get up to $700 a year that you can use built cash for blade. Up to $350 a booking, two bookings. So if you're in New York and you want to take a blade from the airport, you can use your built cash on that. Now, I don't ever take a blade for $200, but if it were $70 that it's cheaper than an Uber, a lot of times I probably would. So I think this is limited. Less on whether I think it's a good value and more on whether I'm going to New York enough times, which, you know, doesn't happen every year, but probably every few years, you can unlock these home away from home benefits. If you don't have gold or platinum status, again, that's the hotel perks. There are lots of ways to get those hotel perks for free, so not worth anything to me. Priority pass guest credits. I have other priority pass cards with free guests, so I wouldn't be using that $60 a year for parking at Built Parking, but only $5 a month. I don't know if their parking partner is on par with every other parking option, but I'm probably not going to pick where I park based on saving $5 a month that I have to think about a couple more. There's $40 a month that you can use on a fitness class credit going to SoulCycle or Barry's. I could see myself doing this a couple times a year. You know, if I think of it as a one third value when I go to Barry's Bootcamp for $13, maybe a couple times $10 a month at Walgreens. If you're already going to Walgreens regularly, this seems like an easy one. Would I change all of our prescriptions to go to WalGreens to save $10 a month? Probably not. But if I regularly go to Walgreens, I could see this as a good way to cash out some built cash. But again, $10 a month. So if you're accumulating tons of built cash, it's going to be hard to use. But if you get $200 of built cash from a card, could this help you get rid of it and get value out of it? Yeah, you get $50 a month for comedy experience bookings. I've never used them, so probably not going to use that $10 a month at the Built Design collection. Again, I've never used those and I've. Most of the things seem overpriced, so. No. And then the one thing that I think is probably the only really exciting one to me, aside from maybe the Blade or Black Lang credits, is this point accelerator. So you have to have the Obsidian or the Palladium card, and you can basically cash in $200 of built cash and get plus 1x points on the next $5,000 of spend. So assuming you're going to spend the $5,000, you can convert $200 of built cash to 5,000 points. So it would turn your 2x card into a 3x card. Or if you're already earning points on mortgage or rent, it might turn your 3.33x card to a 4.33x card for the next $5,000. You can only do it five times a year, which means it's only a way to cash out $1,000 of built cash a year, and that expires after you spend the $5,000 or the year end. So you probably don't want to wait until December to do this. That I think is almost identical to the trade off we talked about earlier, because it was a thousand points for $40 of built cash. And this is five times as much built cash for five times as much points. So, interestingly, that kind of lines up perfectly. So when I went through all these examples, it's like, how much Built Cash could I use if I had unlimited amounts of built cash, what would I actually use? It's the points accelerator, which is $1,000. And then if I sum up the rest, it's probably about $1,000 if I could use a blade credit, probably 500 if I couldn't. So maybe, best case, $2,000 of built cash. And so I'm thinking, okay, does that mean option two is better? To get $2,000 of built cash, you need to spend $50,000, but you're using a lot of that build cash to unlock your mortgage. So this is what can you do with the built cash you earned beyond unlocking all of your housing payments? So if your housing payments are $4,000 a month and you're only spending $3,000 a month on the card, you'll probably use all your built cash to unlock housing points. And you'll never have to have these questions other than, you know, you get some extra points from the welcome bonus or annually. And Also you get $50 of bill cash for every 25,000 points you earn. So you will probably earn some Built cash. Whichever option you choose, that might be able to unlock a few of these things, but you aren't going to earn a ton of Built cash unless you choose option 2. And by the way, that point accelerator option I mentioned, it only works during the months in which you are using the 4% built cash option. Option two, you can't earn Built Cash and then use that built cash to unlock those extra points while you're using the option one, which is to not earn bill cash. Again, this is crazy. I know it's super complicated, but now's when I get to simplify this. What should you do? In my mind, this simplifies to a very short version. I built an overly complicated model. I tested a ton of scenarios where I played with kind of three factors. One, what percent of your housing payments do you spend? I looked at everything from 0 to 500%. I said, what if you put a million dollars on the card? Nobody seems to be getting credit limits much higher than $35,000, so it's going to be tough. But all of the different spend options, what does that look like? Then I looked at within each of those spend options, what does it look like? If you tweak how big your housing payments are? If your housing payments are a thousand dollars a month, or if they're $20,000 a month, how does that change things? In almost all scenarios, whether you picked option one or option two, they were within about 5% of each other in terms of the ROI you get from choosing either one, except for a few places. So if your spending is right at or slightly over only 25% of your monthly housing spend, meaning if your mortgage or Your rent is $4,000 and you're only putting about $1,000 on a card. Now keep in mind, 999 doesn't cut it. If you're putting a thousand or a little bit more than a thousand on a card, option one is definitely better because you're going to basically get an extra 2x points versus 1.33x points. Now, if you spend more than that and you go to 35, 40%, but you don't get all the way up to 50%. Well, now the calculus is different. But if you're spending at least and not that much more than 25% of your monthly housing payments, option one is better. So the next scenario is if your housing payments are less than somewhere around 5 to $7,000. And there are a lot of reasons why this changes. But if that's the case and you spend a lot more than your monthly housing payments on your cards. Option two is probably going to be more rewarding for you. And that's because in option one there's not a 1x points on housing payment cap, it's 1.25x. But because you're spending so much, the value you're going to get from that extra built cash is probably greater than the amount of extra points you're going to get from earning 1.25x instead of 1. So if you have lower housing payments and higher spend, then there's a point where option two is possibly better. Now keep in mind that you can pay multiple rents and multiple mortgages on your bill card. They made that very clear. They've even insinuated that you can make other payments for other people's rent and mortgage. So if you have friends or family that aren't using bilt, you could do that. So if you have housing payments in the 5 to 7k range and you're spending, I don't know, 10 to 20k a month, the best way to maximize would be to find someone who would let you pay their mortgage and pay you back so that you can capture those points. But if that's not the case, I think option two could be a better option for you, kind of depending a little bit on how much you value built cash and the options there. But because of those point accelerators, I think they're going to let you earn the Delta plus more for that scenario. And then the last scenario where it kind of matters which one you pick is if your spending is variable. Because if six months out of the year your spending very little on a card, and six months out of the year you're spending a lot more than being able to accrue and kind of hold built cash so that you can earn points on your housing payment, each month is going to be way more important. So in that case, option two would be much, much better. So if it's me, given that I do have somewhat variable spending, I think I don't want to have to keep track of this. I don't want to have to think, oh gosh, did I spend 74% or 75% of my spending? Like the overhead of that is going to stress me out. And I don't fall into the camp of spending only 25% of our housing payment. And so I think I would just rather go for what I think is the less overhead option for the earnings side, which is option two. Now it comes with the more overhead option of how to get the most value out of this built cash, but that doesn't seem to be as time sensitive until the end of the year. However, if you really want to optimize, you can start with option two, earn enough built cash that you can do all the built cash redemptions that you value. So the points accelerators get enough built cash for a blade ride or whatever it is, and then you can Switch to option 1 for the remaining months of the year. So Tim from the Frequent Miler wrote a post where he kind of identified exactly his optimal strategy and it was like starting with one option, then switching to the other after you kind of max it all out. I do think that's an option you could start to see how much you're spending each month on the card to see how that would play out in option one. Because option one is really driven by hitting those thresholds, spending 25, 50, 75, 100% of your housing payments. Because if you're slightly lower than that, it's actually a lot less rewarding. Again, my advice to them was to just simplify it. I would almost rather earn less points and not have to think than earn slightly more points, but have to think really hard about how much I spend each month, especially when it's like a statement close date, it's not necessarily the end of the month. And so yeah, it's all a lot to think about. And if BILT changes all the cash redemption options, which I'm sure they will, then option two might be better or it might be worse. So yes, it's way more confusing than it needs to be. I still will make a public plea to BILT to say what if you could just make this simple and say everyone who makes housing payments with BILT and has a BILT card will get an extra 1x bilt points on all their spend on the card up to the amount they spend on their housing payments. That is my pitch for a simpler story that gets rid of a lot of this complication and would have finished this episode in 15 minutes. But here we are. And the good news, though, like the silver lining for all of this is the reward we all get for digging through all of this is more points. It is a more lucrative option than almost any other card out there because no matter which option you take or how you value built cash, I think it's a reasonable assumption that you will get at least an extra 1.1 to 1.25x points on all your built card spend up to however much you spend on housing. So if you spend five grand a month on housing, up to five grand a month to spend on your card, you'll get 1.1 to 1.25x points on all your spend. So if you had the palladium card, that's 3.1 to 3.25x on all your spend. On top of that, there's probably my math is that there's an incremental probably 0.15% from the built cash you earn with either option from those milestones along the way. So if we come back to the Palladium card earning 3.1 to 3.25x on all your spend up to the amount you spend on housing payments, even if you don't value points that much, you don't want to transfer them, you just want to book travel in the portal for 1.25 cents a point, then that's slightly more than 4% back on all your spending. Obviously tax payments and things like that excluded. But a 4% on everything card or almost everything card is amazing at face value. I love that proposition. And if you look at Bilt as a company, they've raised over $800 million. They've got a track record for years of delivering value on the Bilt card and not making major, major changes until this one. But also, there isn't another card that earns 4% on everything. So I think where I'm leaning is right now, this is amazing. There isn't a card that offers 4% or more if you want to transfer your points to airlines in value. It's unheard of, right? The best card I'm aware of for transferable points is 2x on everything. Obviously there are cards that earn bonus categories, but 2x on everything. And here is something that for up to your housing spend is probably going to be 3 to 3.25x on all your spend. That's why I won't be surprised if things change down the road or not even down the road before this episode comes out, based on how the last few weeks have been going. But I do think that for now they're very committed to a program that's similar to this and they have enough money to keep it going for a long enough time. Because I just think it'd be crazy for them to change everything, even this year. So as long as they want to offer a card that rewards those who use it as much as this card is, I am here to earn the points. I'm here to earn them in all the ways. I'm here to transfer them to airlines when There are bonuses for an extra 200% which by the way would turn a 3x points card into a 6x points card. So I'm here for it. I expect that it maybe it won't last, but I'm optimistic based on how Bilt has operated over the years that there will be some notice if things change. And until then, let's earn all the points we can. Obviously if you don't have housing payments you don't pay rent or mortgage. 1 Congratulations. That's amazing. These cards are going to be on par with other cards in the market. These aren't for you, but if you do it's interesting and hopefully this saves you the need to make all these spreadsheets. My brain actually hurts from crunching all these numbers. So again if I could make one plea to build it's if you change things in the future, please just try to change them towards a direction of simplicity. I would give up 10% of my earning on this card if you could just make it more simple so that I didn't have to think about it as much. And that's all I have this week. So if you have follow ups on Bilt on anything else for me for a future AMA episode, send them to podcastlthehacks.com or you can go to allthehacks.com ama for Ask Me Anything. That is it for this week. I will see you next week.