← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
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Trying to earn more points, hit big credit card bonuses, or figure out how many cards actually make sense to open in a year. Great, because today I'm answering your questions on optimizing spend, choosing the right cards when paying fees can be worth it, how to use business cards strategically, how to protect your credit score while doing it, and a lot more. Whether you want to go all in or keep things simple, I'm breaking down what actually works and the strategies I'm rethinking. Right now, I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, leave a comment or share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click follow.
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Or subscribe all right, I am excited to continue on with the theme from last week of doing a more conversational style podcast.
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I'm very curious what you all think.
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It won't always be an episode like this, but genuinely appreciate the feedback Today. I'm just going to kind of share a lot of my thoughts on questions that have come in. But but the high level arc here is still about credit cards earning lots of points and a lot of the things that come along the way. So to kick it off I got a tremendous number of questions from you all which by the way, if you want to ask a question which I would greatly appreciate, go to allthehacks.com ama.
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There's a little Google form.
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I'd love it if you put your name so I can mention you on the pod, but if not, totally fine, send your questions there. I'm gonna be doing episodes like this more often. I have a lot of questions to get through today, but I'm gonna keep and I'd love to make this show more about the kinds of questions you have. So after my conversation with Tim Ferriss last year, I got a handful of emails and messages in other places from everyone from friends to listeners that all said, hey, enjoy the conversation. But how did you get so many miles? The number that stuck with most of those people was 15 million.
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How do you have 15 million points and miles?
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How did this come about? Tell me.
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I want to understand it.
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Where did they come from? And so I actually did some work to go and try and break down at least a a little bit of.
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Where and how I got into this situation.
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Now I understand why for many people a large number of points and miles is kind of an aspirational, exciting thing, but it's not necessarily something I'm proud of because points and miles devalue over time and dollars increase in value over time.
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So Accruing way more points than you can use in some reasonably short period.
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Of time is not necessarily a good thing. Now, if you can redeem those points and miles for really, really outsized value, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 cents a point, then sure, redeeming them, even if they're going to devalue, will be valuable. But I'm at the point where I really am trying to question my love of this game and, you know, how much I enjoy earning points and challenge those assumptions against whether I should be focusing more on cash back or just.
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Using these points more.
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And so I'm going to try to burn a lot of points in 2026 because I feel like I need to based on what I've been earning. And by the way, in my mind, all the points that you have, I have, anyone has, they're all effectively bought. It's not free points because I could have been earning cash back. Now, you might have bought them at a really great rate that is easy to get the value from. But I just want to keep that concept in mind that in many of the times when I'm talking about the trade off of how do you earn lots of points, the trade off comes at earning money. And in the case of a signup bonus, it might not be as much money, but in the case of your everyday spending, it might be. So how did I earn all these points? Now, I don't actually know the exact answer.
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Right.
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I could look back over years and try to piece it together, but I don't even think we have kind of Amex Chase account history long enough to make sense of that. What I did try to look at is last year, what did my earning look like and what contributed to the most of it. And looking at the different cards and programs I'm in and just trying to make sense of it. So a few things that I think are kind of relevant points. So when it comes to sign up bonuses, I went back and looked at my wallet and the open dates of all the cards. And I calculate 11 cards between my wife and I that we opened last year in 2025. And I did a rough back of the envelope calculation on what the signup bonuses were on all those cards and the total number there was about 1.7 million points. And so very clearly you could see in our combined wallet of all the cards that we just have open now, not including any cards we've closed, there are 40 cards, which I know for some people seems wildly ludicrous and crazy. And that's fine. You don't have to do this. I'm just going to give you a peek into the world I'm living. And on those cards, I would say the average bonus could probably be as low as 75,000 points, and in the case of the Venture X business, as high as 400,000 points. But if you just assume even 150,000 points, then across 40 cards, that's probably 6 million miles and points just from those cards. So just sign up bonuses is that I am almost certain that over the course of the last handful of years, the number of cards that I've opened is well over 40, because I know there are plenty of cards that we've closed in that period as well. So sign up bonuses are probably the largest contributor to earning points for most people and especially people who play this game heavily. And so that's a big one. So then spend. So up until a couple years ago when I ran a business, I didn't have a ton of spend. So that was definitely not the source of a lot of my points earning. Now, in order to try to increase my amount of spend without increasing my expenses, I would do everything from try to plan trips for people. I would offer to pay for dinner at a group setting and let people reimburse me. I was always the first person to volunteer to put the expense on my card and deal with the hassle of getting reimbursed. And so that was one method. In work settings, I was always willing to use my personal card instead of the company card, especially when I worked at Google, and deal with the hassle of the increased requirements for expenses if you used your own personal cards. So I was always willing to do those things. If a friend said they were trying to book a complicated trip, I'd say, hey, look, I'll be your free travel agent, but I'm gonna put the trip on my card. Does that work? So before owning a company with having real business expenses, there wasn't that many options. Now, one option was taxes, which I will get to in a little bit. Whether that's property tax or your income tax, Those are some things that you can put on a credit card, Though they do come with fees, which is why we'll get back to that in a little bit. If you have the built card, you used to be able to earn points on rent, and now you can earn it on rent and mortgage payments. So that's another source of points. And then this year, and really in the last two or three years, I've introduced a lot more other categories that have increased my Spending way beyond what it normally was. And so I'll share a little bit of those, even though they might not be relevant to you. One is with business expenses. We have a production company that helps us produce this podcast. I have a assistant who's now become a huge member of the team. Shout out to past, you're incredible. And we're able to pay for her employment through a credit card. So lots of business expenses, and some of them with the ability to pay a credit card for free. And some of them, you know, we might use a service like Melio or Plastique to pay that. And this is not going to be a tax episode about our business. Credit card fees, expenses, and how do you treat that? This is not that. Go back and listen to my episode with Jasmine Deluci if you want to dive into that topic. But that is another thing. And then the other big source of this was I have created a couple lines of business, if you will. One of them was spinning up the gift card site that I shared with you all. And some of those gift cards that I would buy to be able to resell to you all, I was able to buy on a card. And then I've mentioned Costco Gold in the past, I've been able to buy some of the Costco gold I resell on a credit card. And. And then the last one was we started doing group trips to Iceland. And so when you plan a group trip, there are a lot of expenses, and I was able to put those on a cart. So I did have a much higher number of dollars to spend this past year and the year before. But when I ran the math on how many points I earned from that spend, it probably wasn't as many points as I earned from signup bonuses. And so that was still the big source of this. And then the other big source is in the last five years, we've had two kids that were very, very young and a pandemic. And so I've been accumulating lots and lots of points, and we just haven't been able to spend them, mostly because we haven't done as much travel with the family in a world where they're really young and, you know, long flights are tough. Prior to that, we would spend a lot more time taking a trip even if we only had a week off to fly overseas somewhere. And that just hasn't been the case. So how do you get to 15 million points? Well, if you earn a lot of points, you do a lot of signup bonuses, and then you don't travel for four or five years as that can be a big impact on how you earn that many points. The other things are just regular flights and hotels. I would say that just the number of flights and hotels I've taken this year personally earns, I don't know, five, maybe low six figures. At points. It's not a huge number, but if you compound that over, you know, a decade, it's probably at least a million points. Promos for Transfer Bonuses if you're a Built Platinum member, they had some huge transfer bonuses that I actually did speculatively, meaning I didn't have a reservation in mind. So I transferred points from Built to Aeroplan to Avianca Life Miles and to British Airways Avios this year and all of those transfer bonuses were 2x transfer bonuses 1 to 2. So I doubled all the built points I had when I transferred there. So that was really cool. That added a big buffer to points. And then some other places to earn points that happen a lot are rakuten and shopping portals and all that kind of stuff. They kind of all add up. So I don't have a total for what was my balance last year and what is it this year and how did that transpire? I think if I went to my Google sheet, I probably would have that. I didn't think about tracking it with version history, but it is something I built into the card tool that I'm working on myself so that I could track my balances over time and see how things are trending. And so definitely I've seen points go up, but I'm really trying to use more of these points and transition a lot of my spending to cash back, at least until I get this balance down a bit. I know a lot of people who say keep only enough points to travel for 18 months because you can earn them. I think I have an irrational fear that maybe one day I won't be able to earn as many points. Maybe the business isn't doing what it does. Maybe signup bonuses are harder to come by. I don't know. And so that irrational fear has led me to kind of hoard them in a way that I'm going to try to do something about this year. This episode is brought to you by.
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Fabric by Gerber Life. I've been thinking about all the things my family depends on. Mortgage, childcare, college someday, and it's made me realize how important life insurance really is, especially when there are options that don't require weeks of paperwork or endless back and forth to get it handled. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today made for busy parents like you all online on your schedule right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. Fabric has flexible policies to fit your family and your budget like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day and and if you're young and healthy, the time to lock in low rates is now. And best of all, with a 30 day money back guarantee, there's no risk and you can cancel at any time. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes@meetfabric.com allthehacks that's meetfabric.com allthehawks M E-E-T fabric.com allthehacks Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states Prices subject to underwriting and health questions this episode is brought to you by bilt. You've heard me talk about BILT as the loyalty program that lets you earn points on rent wherever you live, and they just leveled up even more. As of 2026, homeowners can also earn up to 1.25x points on their mortgage payments. This is thanks to Bilt's three new credit cards, the Palladium Card, Obsidian card and Blue Card. All three turn your housing payments, rent or mortgage into flexible rewards so you can choose the card that fits your lifestyle without missing out on points and exclusive benefits. Built points can be redeemed at top airlines and hotels, Amazon.com purchases, future rent payments and more. Built points have also been ranked by top publications as the industry's most valuable point currency. Your housing payment is already your biggest expense. Make it your most rewarding. Find the card that fits your lifestyle and Apply today at allthehacks.com/built that's all thehacks.com/built B I L T Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Terms and limitations apply subject to approval and eligibility. BILT cards are issued by column NA member FDIC pursuant to license from MasterCard.
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International, Inc. You might be wondering about referrals, which is actually surprisingly not a huge source of points for me. When BILT first launched the card, I did use a referral code, but they started capping that so I don't use my built referral. We do have affiliate links for Chase and Capital One cards on the website, so they're not points generating as much as they are dollar generating for the business and for Amex Links, we gave up our affiliate links because there were just too many restrictions on what we could say or do as a brand and as a podcast and a newsletter. And we use our member referral links. So if you were to join as a member at all the hacks.com join, you could submit your referral links and the links we share on our website and in the podcast go to member referral links. So referral links were not actually a huge source for me as much as they are for some other people. And so that's actually not a big contributor towards the pool of points I have. The real contributor is mostly signup bonuses and spending and then not using it for five years. You could imagine compounding a lot of what I just described over a while and seeing where it ends up. So that's where I'm at. And this dovetails nicely into the next question, which is someone wrote in and said, hey, I've heard a lot of people have 40 credit cards. How does that affect your credit? This seems crazy. So again, you don't have to do what I'm doing, but if you do, normally I've had a really great credit score. And I'm not going to dive too deeply on this because if you go back to episode two 21, which you can get to at all the hacks.com/two to one and there's links to YouTube, Spotify, Apple that'll jump directly to the episode. But I will share that. Up until a couple weeks ago, actually, I've had a near perfect credit score. There are times where my credit score was actually all the way to 8:50. And I realized maybe I'm letting it get too good because, you know, I'd rather get another bonus than have a score that doesn't really matter. But in December, I let some balances on cards hit a high utilization on those individual cards, and I paid the balances off. I'm not holding a balance, but the statement closed. You know, let's say it had a $10,000 limit. It was at $9,800 of $10,000 when the statement closed. And so it reported to the credit bureaus as hitting 100% utilization almost. And that happened kind of randomly across three or four cards at a huge impact to my credit. So having 40 cards, very little impact. And by the way, that's between me and my wife. And many of them are business cards which don't show up on my credit. So if I actually looked at my credit, you would not see anywhere near that many cards. In fact, I'm going to pull it up right now and on my credit There are only 14 credit cards showing up on my credit report. And that's just me. Obviously if I looped in my wife's data there would be more. But so of the, you know, probably 25 credit cards I have only 14 show up on the credit report. But what I will say is letting your balance hit a high amount of utilization at the end of the month can have a huge impact on your credit score. I think my most recent credit score I checked was mid-600, like 640 or something. But I expect it to be back in the kind of low 800s in the next few weeks because those cards are no longer going to report at almost 100% utilization. And that reminds me, you are allowed to pay your card off before the statement cuts. And so something that I'm now setting reminders up for actually building that into this app I'm working on is that how can you remind yourself if you have a high balance on a card and the statement closes on X date, maybe make the payment before the statement closes if it matters for you to not have such an impact on your credit. I did just get an alert today and I'm looking at that my one of the three balances that was high decreased by a significant amount and my credit score went up 45 points. I just saw that in a few minutes ago. And so has a huge impact how much utilization you have, much less impact how many accounts you have. In fact, I'd imagine most people who open more and more accounts see their credit score go up. Now obviously that's only if you pay your card off in full each month. That is a requirement for this game. If you're not doing that, stop, do not pass go, don't play this game at all. So now we've talked about how to get that many points. I talked about sign up bonuses being a big component of it. Kevin and Ty both sent in the same question, which was some version of how many signup bonuses is the right number per year. Kevin said, he's got a busy year. He doesn't have a lot of time. Ty said, I just want to understand like what is the average number that you're trying to target? So I thought I'd share my take on this. There are kind of two constraints to opening up more cards. One is getting approved and one is having the spending to meet the signup bonus. So I'll throw out the spending one first. That's easy if you only spend $30,000 a year, then you really need to factor that into how many bonuses you might consider these two constraints of getting approved and how much you can spend. They both are constraints, but if you only spend enough to get approved for four bonuses a year, it doesn't matter if you could get approved for 10. Now, obviously there's a third constraint, which is just how much mental overhead do you want to spend on this project and this hobby? But I'm going to set that one aside. So when it comes to spending, I would say the average signup bonus is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of three to six thousand dollars on a personal card and probably five to twenty thousand dollars on a business card. That doesn't mean there aren't some business cards with incredibly high spending requirements, but it's kind of a little bit of an average. So that should guide how many signup bonuses you can do a year. Now, the average return on spend on a lot of these signup bonuses is really, really high. I'm looking at this table I made, and lots in the 20s, lots in the tens, a couple in the 30s and 40s. So, you know, an Amex Platinum, if you're earning 175,000 points after $8,000 spend, that's about a 34% return based on how you value Amex points, not 34x points. So some of these bonuses can be really, really more lucrative than your everyday spending. Which is why when I got a question from Deshai about, hey, I looked through all this, shouldn't my strategy just always be going for a bonus and not even worry about whether I have a card that earns the most on dining or groceries? And I would say yes, like, to the extent you can always be working on a signup bonus, that will probably, if not, certainly be the most lucrative way to earn points. However, you are still constrained by your approvals, or if you just don't have the mental bandwidth to deal with this. Like the idea of changing all of your auto pays every month and that kind of stuff. At least if those auto pays are a high percentage of your spending. So let's come back to approvals. You can't just get approved for an unlimited number of cards from an unlimited number of issuers. We brought this up briefly last week. You know, if you're not getting approved from major issuers, maybe look elsewhere. But at some point you'll probably need to slow down and you might be in the penalty box, which is kind of the sweet spot where I like to play is not so many cards that if something were to open that I really wanted, I would be able to get approved for it because sometimes there are benefits or perks or things that get unlocked by having a new card that I really want to make sure I can do. So these new built cards are going to have really interesting ways to earn points on rent and mortgage. If I had opened up 25 cards in the last three months, it's very likely that I might not get approved for that card and I don't want to be in that situation. So for me the sweet spot is probably somewhere in the order of one to two cards a quarter. But keep in mind if you're playing this with multiple players, that calculus changes. So maybe it's two to three a quarter, but between my wife and I and so that's something that I think the more players you have, some people with adult children might be able to help manage this game for four people. And there's a lot more opportunities there. And so I think if you want to rack up a ton of points somewhere between once a quarter and once a month, depending on your spend and the number of players in your household is probably a sweet spot that going beyond that, you wouldn't need my advice. You would already be at a point that you could do this a lot more and you would know what your tolerance is and how you're able to meet those spending requirements. So to go back to Deshai's question, yes, I think a sub only strategy and sub meaning sign up bonus is a great strategy to the extent you're willing to do that. Otherwise you could just focus on some of the maybe lower return on spend but higher bonus cards. And that's something that I find myself a little bit more attracted to, not wanting to open up as many cards as other people. And I realize as you're listening you might think, wow, between you and your wife you opened 11 cards last year. That's crazy. I have other friends who've probably opened 20 or 30 cards just in their name in the last year. So yes, there's a spectrum I might feel relative to some groups like I'm not that far down it, while relative to others I'm way far down it. That's generally how I look at it, but especially on some of the business cards. The Venture X business recent offer was a multi part bonus, but if you combine them it was 400,000 points on 150,000 spend. So that made it, I think combined with the 2x points you got on the card, about a 6.8% back card. If you looked at it relative to evaluation for capital one points, that I think is probably 1.45 cents, I think. And so that's pretty compelling to me. And it just means you need one. So, yes, that signup bonus on a return on spend basis is not as good as others where you might earn 20,000 points and only have to spend $6,000. But it's better than not having a signup bonus. And it was so much spend over six months that I didn't have to think about other cards. So I'm a little more attracted these days to the business cards that have bigger spend requirements and bigger bonuses. And they might not be as lucrative as seven personal cards, but they also don't have the impact on the credit of having seven personal cards on your credit report. And business might be zero. And in the case of Capital One, it didn't report to my credit. So it actually doesn't impact my ability to maybe open a Chase card in the near future. As for getting approved for business cards, I think there is an assumption that you are only eligible for a business card if you kind of have an incorporated business with an office space and all that kind of stuff. That is pretty far from the truth. I think for a business card, often you need to have something that is a business. But that business could be you resell things on the Internet, you consult, you have a social media presence that one day you want to monetize, you have done some freelance work or speaking engagement or you know, you sell baked goods. There are a lot of things that I think would qualify you to meet the requirements of a business card that you might not think at the outset. So I would say if you're not sure if you're eligible for business card, is there anything you do that is a business you might be in the middle of starting? Are you thinking about doing freelance work? Well, you have a business doing freelance work. You don't have to have customers or revenue before you have a business card. You don't have to have revenue before you have a business. So I would think long and hard about whether you're eligible for a business card because there are just a lot of opportunities, especially with large bonuses on business cards. And so I think that's been a big source of points for me and I know a lot of people in this space. In fact, someone asked a question, if you own multiple LLC and you keep getting these AMEX letters in the mail, can you open one up for each of your llc? Because they keep marketing me these cards, but I Already gotten the bonus. What I'll say is amex is pretty notorious for sending a ton of mail to business owners. And by business owner, it's usually you've opened one business card and many of these letters that you get in the mail with a promo for a Business Gold or a Business Platinum card don't have the same language that the website has. When you look at the terms of the offer, which usually is you are not eligible for this bonus if you've had this card before. A lot of the ones that come in the mail don't have that language. They're kind of known in the industry as no lifetime language or NLL mailers. And so that is another area where I know business owners who've opened four or five AMEX Business Platinums not because they skirted the rules, but because AMEX literally sent them four or five letters in the course of, you know, 12 to 18 months saying, we would love you to get another Business Platinum or another Business Gold. And so they were just following amex's recommendation of getting another one. And so if you imagined you opened five Business Platinums in a year, you'd have to spend five times the signup bonus spending requirement, which I think right now is $20,000. So you'd have to spend a hundred thousand dollars, but you'd end up with a hundred thousand points for that spend plus a million points for all the bonuses. And that's if you do a 200,000 point bonus. If you search around on the Internet, Sometimes there are 250 and 300,000 point bonuses that you can find as well. We do have links to all the bonuses on our website, allthehacks.com cards. But in the case of Amex, sometimes there are better offers elsewhere and if you search around, you might find them. In the case of some issuers like Capital One and Chase, usually that's not the case. But again, if the best offer is on our site, we'd love it if you want to use those links. Our members would love it if you want to use the Amex links. But if you find a better offer somewhere else, go get the best points you can. If your partner has a referral link, use you at their link and get the most points you can. If not, yeah, we'd love your support, but totally want you to get the most points and prioritize that above all other things. This episode is brought to you by Gusto.
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Every January, I get the urge to level up, not just personally, but for my business too. And upgrading to Gusto is one of the easiest ways to do it. And this year we've moved our health insurance to Gusto, which gives me one less thing to worry about so I can focus on the business. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. I'm a huge fan and I've used Gusto for almost every company I've started. It's so great. And they also do automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp 401k, and much more. There is a reason Gusto is the number one payroll software on G2 and trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. Try Gusto today at gusto.com allthehacks and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com alltheHacks One more time Gusto.com alltheHacks this episode is brought to you by Notion. I use Notion for a huge amount of my business, tracking projects, organizing ideas, planning episodes, and keeping everything in one place. What's always mattered most to me is having a single system that actually holds everything together as things scale. Notion brings all your notes, docs and projects into one connected space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and actually fun to use. With AI built right in, you spend less time switching between tools and more time creating great work. And now with Notion Agent, your AI doesn't just help with work, it finishes it. It can tap into your Notion workspace, the web and connected tools like Slack and Google Drive to complete assigned actions end to end so you can focus on the hard stuff. So try Notion now with notion agent@notion.com allthehacks that's all lowercase letters. Notion.com allthehacks to try your new AI teammate notion agent today, and when you use our link, you're supporting our show notion.comAllTheHacks so I think that's a good.
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Point to transition to a question which someone sent in. That said, for someone who prizes simplicity, opening up multiple credit cards and managing points and rewards seems like it takes a lot of time and effort. What advice do you have for people like me who want to maximize their finances but keep things as simple and easy as possible? Well, I think there's two thoughts that I have, probably three as I continue talking. One is if you want to maximize and simplify, those are definitely in contention with each Other there are satisficers who are okay not getting the maximal output who are usually happier in the long run. So I would say the key is knowing when to stop. And I would say if this is not fun, you should stop before it gets not fun. Because that's certainly the point to stop if it's fun, but it's impeding into other things. That's another point to consider stopping. You get to choose how far you want to maximize and what level of enjoyment you have in this game would probably be a really strong driver into how much you want to maximize. And it's definitely an 80 20. I think I looked at what is the optimal mix of cards in your wallet to maximize your spending, and it was two cards gave you the maximal output for the minimal amount of work. You could add a third card and get a little bit more. But having the right two cards made such a big impact. If you had two cards and did two to three signup bonuses a year, that would probably be the 8020 of this game. And you wouldn't have to think about it a lot. And I would just kind of be waiting for someone to send an email. We send an email every Saturday morning. All the hacks.com email to sign up. It's free. And I try not to send every offer there is. I try to send deals and offers or at least level them up to their own post in the newsletter when it's something that's kind of unique or different or elevated. And so if you cherry pick two or three of those a year and then put your spending on one or two cards that really kind of dial in your spending patterns and hit the maximum there, I think that's an 80 20. That would probably make your life a lot more simple. When I think about being over optimized, it's really probably about being under optimized. When I think about people over optimizing, I actually, in a weird way, they're under optimized because you're not optimizing the right things. I love this, right? Like some people have a garageband, some people have a woodworking hobby, some people go free water swimming. I personally like this hobby and it's fun for me and so I'm okay spending more free time on it. But there are other things that I want to make sure I prioritize. And so there's a lot of push and pull there. As you know, from my kind of annual planning episode. Really trying to be more intentional about my time is something I really care about. And So I am not as focused on all the management of this as I used to be. And in some cases I can automate it. So that's why I built this tool that I'm working on, is to just make a lot of this a lot simpler so I can hit a more maximum return on everything with spending less time, so it feels more simplistic. So definitely a strategy. But if you want to take it one step further, someone said, hey, what if I just want cash back? What's the simple story there? We've talked about this in the past, but I think there are a few minor changes worth covering. The US Bank Altitude Reserve used to be a great option. That card no longer meets those requirements. I think if you don't want to hold a balance at a financial institution, the robinhood card at 3% on everything, is probably a good single card. If you're willing to move $100,000 of assets, whether that's stocks or crypto or cash, that you could park in like a USDC crypto account at Coinbase, I think the Coinbase card and the bank of America card are interesting. I think Coinbase, you might need 250,000 to get the full 4%. But on the bank of America side, If you move $100,000 and hit their platinum honors status, you get a 2.6 to 5% effective cash back rate, which is not as good as the Robinhood rate. If you do get that bank of America Premium Rewards Elite card, and there's a full breakdown in the episode I did. On bank of America, you get three and a half percent on travel and dining and 2.6 to 5 on everything else, which probably averages to right around the same as 3% on everything, depending on your spending. And then I think if you're willing to earn points that you don't have to do a lot of work to redeem, meaning points that give you value booking travel in the portal versus, you know, necessarily transferring them to airlines and hotels and having to find award availability. The new cards from Built seem like they could be pretty interesting to the extent you have mortgage or rent payments that you make each month that are equal to or maybe greater than your monthly spending on your cards. I think you can get pretty close to a 4% return by using the new built cards, paying your rent or mortgage using that 2x palladium card that they've launched and kind of combining all that together. And then if you don't want to transfer your points, you can book travel in the Portal and get 1.2, 5 cents per point and I think that's a pretty good option. So if I was thinking cash back, I would not write off points cards that you can kind of redeem in travel portals in a more simplistic way than having to play the transfer points game. Look, I love playing the transfer points game. I think that if you play that game you can get even more value. But it introduces a lot of overhead that some people just aren't interested in. Marcus sent in a question. Just saying, hey, specifically are there some cards to focus on for welcome bonuses? If I've got a lot of spend for my wedding coming up, and I would say first make sure that that wedding spend isn't going to charge you a fee to use your card. We will come to that. That is a topic that I'll bring up shortly. But when it comes to which cards to open, given the nature of the podcast where I'm recording Now on Friday, January 16, things change all the time. Bonuses come and go. And Marcus actually said, hey, I have the mainstays. I've gotten the Chase Sapphire Preferred, the Capital One Venture X. I've done Amex Platinum. So I kind of, I'm not eligible for a lot of the most frequently recommended cards. What would you do if you were looking for signup bonuses? Well, this is a great question to come off the conversation earlier about where to go to earn lots of signup bonuses. I think the place that Marcus and a lot of people start looking next is okay, business cards. We talked about that. That unlocks a ton of options, especially if you are familiar with. I'm a Chase Sapphire reserve user or a Venture X user or an Amex Platinum user. We already know that ecosystem. You could pair it up with a business version of each one of those cards and then earn the same currency on the same platform on the same login, but be eligible for the signup bonus. So that's one Path Airline and hotel cards. The offers range, they probably go up and down by 30 or 40% throughout the year. We've seen American, Alaska and United cards all over 100,000 points. Delta's often over a hundred thousand points as well. Hotel cards can go much higher, 175,000 points. Or Hyatt and Marriott right now are doing five night free certificates for signing up for their cards. I will caution anyone who's kind of new to this is that always hotel points seem like a better offer because there are more of them, but they're often much less valuable. So Hyatt Point is probably the exception. But a Marriott Hilton IHG Choice Privileges points are often kind of valued in the.05 to.06 0.7 range. And airline miles are often valued in the 1.3 to 1.5, 1.6 cent range. So that's why hotel cards seem more lucrative. But 175,000 Hilton points might be worth half as much as 175,000 airline points. But 175 is a really big number. And so I'm not saying don't get the hotel cards, they're decent options. But if you are able to use those free night certificates, getting five free nights at Hyatt or Marriott is certainly a really compelling welcome bonus as well. But again, those things need to be used usually within a year of issuance. So make sure you have a plan to use them and make sure you understand how they work. Because some of them, if not all of them are capped in terms of what value you can get from them. So with the exception of the Hilton free night certificates, the Marriott, the Hyatt ones, there's a number of point limit. So if you have a category one to four or a 85,000 point certificate on Marriott, sometimes you can top it up a little. But oftentimes, you know, you're kind of stuck at on Hyatt category one to four. So if you regularly stay at hotels that are not in those category levels, those certificates might not be worth it. A lot of people haven't stretched over from Amex and Chase to Capital One or Citi, so there's definitely something worth looking at there. They've got some great transfer partners. And then there's this rumor that I saw yesterday that Wells Fargo is going to launch a new kind of more, I don't know anything about it, a travel card with a six figure signup bonus. That's all I know. Wells Fargo points, not as exciting with a more limited set of transfer partners, but one cool feature is you can transfer points from Wells Fargo to airlines and hotel groups with no minimum increments. You can transfer just one point. So I do like the idea of having some Wells Fargo points just for those incidents where I might need to have, you know, 40,100 points. And so I'd love to be able to just transfer 100 and make it even. But all the other programs would require you to transfer 41,000. And so having a little stash of Wells Fargo points could come valuable. Or in those cases where you just want to keep the account alive so the points don't expire, I'd rather Just transfer one point than a thousand points. And then, then as of right now, the Built Palladium card has a 50,000 point signup bonus, which is not the hugest bonus compared to a lot of others. But if you end up with Built Gold status, which is part of the welcome bonus, and there's a transfer bonus in that window, you might be able to turn 50,000 built points into 75 or even 100,000 airline miles. So that is true with Chase and Capital One and Amex as well. But usually it's a 10 to 30% bonus. And at BILT, we've seen 25 to 100% bonuses. One question Kevin wrote in to clarify that kind of ties into this about earning bonuses is just trying to make sense of the Chase bonus requirements and rules. Used to be that you could get Chase Sapphire Preferred, you could open one up every 48 months. What are the rules now? He was asking, just trying to make sure he understood it. And so the way I understand it, you are no longer eligible for the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Chase Sapphire Reserve bonus. If you've had the card ever, it's now a once in a lifetime bonus requirement. However, you can now get both of those bonuses in relatively short period of time. And however, you can't have the cards at the same time. So if you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred and you want to downgrade it, maybe wait a couple weeks, apply for the Chase Sapphire Reserve. If you've never had it, you should be eligible for that bonus as well. So you can double up on both bonuses. You just can't have the cards at the same time. Bonuses earning, that kind of covers it. I want to come back to that topic of fees for earning points. I get a lot of times people send a message and say, hey, my daycare is charging 3%. Does this make sense for my company? I've got to pay a bunch of expenses. Sometimes it's two and a half, sometimes it's 3% or college tuition or property taxes. How do you think about that? At the end of the day, if you're paying a fee to use your credit card, you're buying points, but you're buying points for even more. Because actually, if you're using a points card instead of a cashback card, you're also buying those points. Now you're paying a fee, so you're paying even more to buy those points. So I typically think that for personal transactions where you're covering the full cost of the fee, it's not a business expense. Anything getting close to two and a half, 3% only really ever makes sense if it's the difference between you meeting a welcome bonus and not. Right. I mentioned that a lot of these bonuses, the kind of ROI is somewhere in the 10 to 40% range. So I'm looking right now at some other ones. The Alaska personal card earn 80,000 points after $4,000 of spend in 120 days. Okay, so if there's no way for you to meet that $4,000 of spend without putting $2,000 towards your college tuition or your property tax and paying 3%, well, that $60 fee isn't worth it to get points on $2,000, but it would be worth it if it's the thing that makes you able to get the 80,000 point welcome bonus. So if you are looking at how many welcome bonuses you want to do a year and you only have the spend to do three, but if you spent a little bit of money, you could maybe put money your property taxes or your tuition on your credit card. There's a world where that makes sense. However, keep in mind that those fees are things you have to pay now. And if you're earning just points, then you can't necessarily cash those points out. So you're effectively buying points. Now, you might be buying them for an incredible deal, but I want to encourage you to consider that if you don't have the cash flow to be buying points while they're on sale, I wouldn't want to be doing that. There are some cases where I think the fee comes down a bit and can be more interesting. So aside from business expenses, where there might be, you know, a business expense reason that that fee makes sense. Two things I know of. If you have a built rewards account and you don't even have to have the BILT card, you can use it to pay your rent. I don't know if this will translate over to mortgage or not. That's actually an open question I have. But if you have an Alaska personal card, you can earn three 3x points on your Alaska card for a 3% fee. So instead of earning 1x for 3%, you can earn 3x for 3%. You're still effectively buying Alaska points for $0.01 each. So I don't recommend that unless you know that you're going to get more value from Alaska than 1 cent a point. Now, you might also be using that spend on a card to earn status on Alaska. So maybe it's worth a little bit more to you than just maybe you could argue that. Well, it's really like I'm buying status for 10% of the cost and points for 90%. So I'll let you think about that one. The other big one is taxes, because the fees to pay taxes by credit card are lower than most other platforms charge you to use a credit card. Now, I'll link in the show notes to an episode we did on paying taxes with a credit card. There haven't been that many changes since we last covered it. The biggest one is that there's now only two providers that you can use that offer really competitive fees and that those providers now charge a larger fee if you're using a business card. However, if you're using ACI, which there's pay 1040 and ACI, and pay 1040 fee for personal cards is 1.75% and ACI is 1.85%. So I would always lean towards pay 1040. But with ACI, you can also pay through PayPal. And when you pay through PayPal, you can use a business card in your PayPal account and that still only gets charged 1.85%. So there are a lot of cards, I think, where paying a 1.75 to 1.85% fee might make up for the points you're earning. If you just had the bank of America Premium Rewards Elite card or the unlimited cash card and you had Platinum Honor status and you were earning 2.6 to 5%, the spread there is, you know, slightly less than 1%. Maybe it's 0.8%. So I could argue that's, that's a pretty good ROI on the margins. But it really comes down to how much of your taxes. If you owe $1,000 in taxes, you might think, I'm smart, I'm going to go pay my taxes by credit card. I'm going to get 0.8% spread on this. But that's $8. So I would argue there are times and places where this makes sense. Maybe you are trying to earn status towards the end of the year and you need to put some spend on a card and taxes are a really affordable way to do that and buy points cheaper than you otherwise would. But don't look at these arbitrages and say, wow, I can make money paying my taxes by credit card and then not realize that maybe the savings you're going to make or the profit you'll make from that, you know, transaction is only measured in, you know, dollars or tens of dollars. It might not be worth the hassle and the time and the energy to do it. But let's say it is. Let's say this is your way that you meet minimum spend. And if you go back and listen that episode on taxes, you'll find out that if you do this optimally and you have a player too, you don't have to just make one payment. You can make multiple payments. I think it's two payments per person, per processor, per pay period, which is your four quarterly payments, your extension payment, and your tax payment. So there could be lots of payments you could make. And so at 1.75 to 1.85%, that might be worth doing if it unlocks more welcome bonuses for you. And so someone asked, and if you hear me not mention a name, we got a lot of anonymous questions this time. Can you ask your employer to reduce your withholdings so that you pay less taxes out of your paycheck and you have more taxes you can pay on your credit card? Best I understand, and I am not a lawyer, I'm not an accountant, I'm not a tax advisor, but best I understand it is not a problem from a legal standpoint to under withhold. So that is not a problem. But many employers don't make this the easiest process. So I would say reach out to your payroll provider or your HR department and ask them, hey, what do I need to do? You could say, I find myself getting a refund. I'd like to adjust my withholdings. This is something where I wouldn't necessarily take the advice as gospel, but you could ask an LLM, your favorite AI tool, what might make this easier. Take a look at it. It is possible, but I think some companies don't make it as easy as you'd want. And when I looked into this, I was looking into it specifically for my own payroll. For me as a business where I was in control of the payroll as the business and the receiving end. That's the perspective I looked at, was that it is not a problem if I want to under withhold on my payroll for myself. And so I actually didn't withhold federal taxes on my payroll at the end of last year to leave more room to pay taxes by credit card.
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This episode is brought to you by Gilt. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy. And as tax time gets closer, getting prepared now is so important. Now that I'm working with G, I actually feel like I have a partner I can trust to handle everything for my personal and business taxes. Think of G as the ultimate modern CPA. Of course they have an in house team of expert CPAs to work with who can help you determine the most effective tax strategies to minimize risk and grow your wealth. But they also have an amazing tech platform that gives you personalized guidance to maximize deductions, tax credits and savings. It also has an amazing document vault where you can upload all your files, tag them with relevant years, and even see which your tax team has reviewed. Beyond that, the tax library you get access to as a client has dozens of in depth guides on things like choosing retirement plans, taxes for new parents, qualified business income, and more. So if you're ready for a more premium proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes, you have to check out Gelt. And as an all the hacks listener, you can skip the wait list. Just head to allthehacks.com gelt g e l t again, that's allthehacks.com g e l t to stop overpaying on taxes.
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Thank you so much for being here today.
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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.
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A couple fun ones that I think are interesting thought experiments. One was about if your primary use for points was hotel stays, how would it affect your card setup and what would you do differently? And one thing I say is I might just earn cash back. I think that what's really interesting is that if you earn a bunch of Hyatt points, I love Hyatt. I think the program's awesome. I think the ability to use confirmed suite upgrades is great. But not every hotel is a Hyatt and so it is just much more difficult to earn points that give you flexibility to stay wherever you want on the hotel side than it is on the airline side. Almost every airline you can fly from point A to point B, and especially if you live in a city with a hub, is an airline where you can transfer points and book a flight. Maybe you can't book any flight, maybe it's not always a good deal, but it's a little bit more straightforward in that almost all airline flights are part of programs that have loyalty programs, whereas hotels is not all the same. And if you look at the airline, you know, transferable points programs, almost every program, if not every program, between Chase, Amex, City, Wells Fargo, Capital One built, there's at least one airline you can transfer to in each alliance, whereas hotel groups. I don't think there is any card that lets you transfer to all the hotel programs. In fact, I know there's not. And so you need to spread yourself a little bit wide if you want to make sure you have points in enough places that if where you're going only has a Hilton, you know you're able to do it. So I would say if I were solely focused on hotels, I would make a strong case to just focus on cash back. If you want a great deal at Hilton IHG Choice hotels using points, just buy the points. You could buy Hilton points and then book with points. And so that would be a strategy I would think about taking, especially with some of the offers I've seen lately on Capital One Shopping. If you install their browser extension. I've seen things that are like 20% off Hilton and kind of some really crazy deals. I've seen things that were like 20% off hotel group bookings through Capital One Shopping. So I just think if your only focus is hotels, points might not be for you. If you still want points. I would say the place I would focus on is either Hilton cards, because I really think the Hilton free night certificates can add a ton of value. So if you're focused on Hilton cards, you're not only spending to earn Hilton points, but you're also spending to earn more free night certificates. Or I would focus on Hyatt, where there's a really a lot more outsized value, which means you're going to be focused on earning Chase or Built points because those both transfer to Hyatt. So that's where I would focus if I only cared about hotels. But again, I think cash back would be a strong case there. Oh, and by the way, that hotel question was from Mike. I forgot to read his name. I was so used to so many anonymous questions. So thank you, Mike. Next was a question from Kunal about clear fees and really wanted to know, do you actually value clear as a program and how do you pay for that membership and which card are you using? And so clear. For anyone who's not familiar, it's kind of like if pre check lets you do a more expedited version of security, clear lets you do a more expedited version of getting to that security. You can kind of basically have a shorter line. You don't always need to have your ID though. I've had a lot of recent checks where they're like, hey, we do need to check your id. You kind of shorten the line, but it doesn't change the actual security process. If you have pre check, you still go through the same pre check security it's just the line you take to get there can be shorter. And so I've gotten a lot of value out of saving time at the airport with Clear, though sometimes it doesn't feel like it's actually any faster. But they asked, how do you pay for this? And so there are a handful of amex cards, the Platinum, Business Platinum Green and Hilton Aspire cards that all come with clear credits that kind of COVID the annual fee for Clear. So that is the easiest way to do it. I think if you're looking at the Platinum and Business Platinum, like Kunal was thinking, gosh, I don't know if I actually want this card. I would consider both so that you don't lose all your AMEX points, but also as a kind of sleeper card downgrading to the consumer. Amex Green Card. No one really talks about this card as much. I've talked about it a few times, but I don't hear a lot of talking, mostly because there's no big signup bonus. There's no affiliate links. I don't think there's referral links. But it is a 3x dining, 3x travel, 3x transit card, and it comes with a Clear credit. And for those not familiar, Clear, I think is now $209 a year, and that card's $150 a year. So if you were going to pay for Clear anyways, that card is a profit. Now, I will go back to what I said before. It would be a $69 profit. And by the way, if you open up a Delta, Alaska or United frequent Flyer account, or you already have one, you already get $10 off. So clear is $199. So yes, opening up an Amex green card would save you $49 a year by covering your Clear cost. I would not open up a card for $49 a year. But if you already have an Amex card and you're thinking it's too expensive and you want to downgrade, I think it's an interesting option. Or the Hilton Aspire card, because while it does have a very high annual fee, you do get a free night certificate. And I think it's pretty easy to get a lot of value from. And if you stay at any number of Hilton's, I think the Hilton diamond status is pretty good. Getting breakfast, not as much on the upgrades. And so I think the Hilton Aspire card has been able to be a good value for us. And we have enough of them that we cover our Clear memberships and a couple other people in our families. So it is cheaper for families. So if you add people to your account, you bring the price down. And I think if you're a student also. So that's another thing. That's an option. And then Kunal had another question on these Chase doordash credits and like how do you actually get value from them? And the short answer is I let them go most months. You know, you get I think a couple 10 or $20 credits, some of which are only good for restaurants. I think there's a $5 credit, maybe that's only good for restaurants. And then the $10 credit is good for non restaurant spend. This goes to show how little I know about them. Just because I try not to maximize these credits because I find that if I'm going to place a doordash order to say $5, I'm probably spending more than I was planning to in the first place. However, I did a little bit of research and I would say if you really want to maximize and optimize here, which I'm going to encourage you not to do, but if you do, you can use these non restaurant doordash credits for grocery stores, gas stations and convenience stores. You can use them for pickup. I know a lot of people who will maybe order a deli sandwich from Safeway that'll count as grocery and they can pick it up for lunch or order stuff from 711 and stop by there and pick something up. Maybe you need milk and you're going to swing by 711 to pick up milk anyways, we might as well use your doordash credit to do in store pickup and get that milk for free. So that's actually something that I might consider doing. But I'm certainly not going to drive all the way to 711 to get $10 off a purchase that I most likely wasn't going to make anyways. I'm just going to let that credit go. And when I think about the value of that credit, when I evaluate what to do with a credit card, I'm going to value it at zero. Or maybe for me it's probably like 20 or 30 bucks a year because we sometimes do use doordash and when we do, we save money. But I'm not focused heavily on trying to maximize that particular credit. Okay, three more questions left today. One is on a conversation I had about American loyalty status as kind of a fun game that I mentioned, I think in my Top 5 Mistakes episode and said, hey, why are people already going after this? Is there something I'm missing? Is there A hack to getting it. The short answer is no, there's not a hack to getting American status. It's opening up an American card and spending money on it. The reason why I think people talk a lot about American over other airlines and earning status is kind of twofold. One, when it comes to the highest tier of status, the amount of spend you need to do on an American card is lower to get that highest tier than others. And there was this awesome post I ran across on Reddit a few weeks ago that someone outlined the credit card spend you need to guarantee every tier of status by airline, by which cards. And it's like this cool chart and it's four images. So I'll link to that in the show notes. And if you look at it, you'll kind of see when it comes to getting lower tier status, first tier status, the easiest airlines to do it on are Alaska and Delta. Because with the Atmos Summit card, you can spend $20,000 on the card, you get 10,000 points towards status, plus it comes with 10,000 points towards status. So you're already there at the kind of base tier Atmos Silver on the Delta reserve card, you're halfway there. With one Delta card, it could be the reserve or the Platinum. And in fact, the easiest way to get first tier status on Delta is if you have two Delta cards, two Platinum or reserve, including the business versions, you're already there. But if you just have one and you have the Delta reserve card, I think you have to spend $25,000 on that card and that will unlock silver status on Delta. So those are the easiest ones by far. United is way more. To spend enough on a United card to get their first tier of status, according to this chart, you've got to spend close to $70,000. Now, if you jump this up and look at fourth tier status, I'm not going to walk through all of these. But the reason why American is something people talk about is that you only have to spend, and I say only $180,000 on the American executive card to get to top tier status. Now that is a lot of spend and no one should have to spend $180,000 to get that status because that would imply that you've not earned any part of your way towards status on that airline. Otherwise. And if you're not flying American enough to earn some amount towards status on American, then why are you trying to get it? And if you're never flying American, don't waste your time on the status. But if you look at the Airlines on this list that require the most spend, it's United at about $400,000 to hit their top tier of status. And so Delta and Alaska are kind of somewhere in that 250,000 range. So United is far and away the most expensive airline to earn status war. And American on the top tier status level is the least expensive. Layer on the fact that American for the last two years and confirmed in 2026 has a promotion that they've continued on the business card, where if you add authorized cardholders in your business employee cards, the employee gets all of the loyalty points from their spend on that card, and you as the primary cardholder, also get it. So if you were to have a business with two people and all the spend went on that employee card and you spent whatever it took to get to whatever tier status you want, you would both get the loyalty point. So it's a little bit of a two for one. So, yes, you might need to spend 180. Or actually, in this case, you know, it wouldn't be the executive card, it'd be the business card. So you need to spend $200,000 to get top tier status on American, but you'd get it for two people. So you could argue it's even cheaper. So if you factor that in, the reason people talk about gaming American status is just that it is the least expensive top tier status to get. And it's half the cost if you get it for two people at once. Next, this is one that I think is, I don't know. I go spend a lot of time at Costco, so I guess near and dear to my heart, but I don't have a Costco card. And someone just asked, you know, I hear a lot about the Costco card both being great and also not being great for Costco. Is there a better card for Costco? We spend a lot there. And another anonymous question. But unfortunately, there is not an awesome card for Costco, right? There are cards that are great, but there's not an awesome card. The only exception here that comes to mind is that I think the Venmo card, if you spend money at Costco, this spend categorizes as grocery. The wholesale clubs are categorized as grocery. I don't know if that's a Venmo thing or if that's a synchrony thing, which is the bank that issues the card. So that is one option. So if you spend a lot of Costco, you do 3%. But again, if you're gonna open a card so that you can get 3% at Costco. You could also open up the Robinhood card and get 3% at Costco and 3% everywhere else. 3% is not a, an earnings rate that I would probably open up a card for. And so the short answer to the question is, is there a great card for Costco? My answer would be there is not a card I would open up if I spend a lot of money at Costco because there just aren't that many cards that are that rewarding. What instead I would do is I would optimize for what is a good everything else card. And for you, that might be. You want points. Maybe that's the Venture card that is or venture x2x on everything. If you want cash back, maybe that's one of the bank of America cards or the other ones we mentioned earlier that are kind of good everything cashback cards. And I would use that card at Costco. I think there are some cards that let you select a category, or your top category of the month might include wholesale clubs. But most of those cards cap what is usually like 5 or 6% back out at, you know, $500 a month. And so if you spend a lot at Costco, I'm guessing you're spending more than $500 a month. So getting one of those cards just for the sake of Costco might not be as lucrative as it seems when on the surface it might say 5% back on Costco or wholesale clubs. But when you dig in, it's probably not as good as it seems. And so there is not a great Costco card. I would optimize for something that earns 2x points or 3% back in that ballpark and just call it a day and not worry about trying to optimize it further. But if you're spending a lot of Costco and you don't have an executive membership, I would definitely do that to get your extra 2% back on all your spend. And then last, I'm going to briefly touch on Bilt again because since recording last week, I got so many texts from friends wanting me to confirm that the new built cards were as bad as they thought they were from everything they'd read and what they've tried to interpret themselves. So first off, if you didn't know Bilt is a sponsor of the podcast, I think we actually have an ad for Bilt in this episode. I've loved Bilt points and my card long before they became a sponsor. I actually think I reached out to them to ask them if they would be a sponsor and they do pay us when we do an ad for them on the show. It's not an affiliate arrangement. I don't get any compensation whether you sign up for a BILT card or not. But I want to disclose, you know, anytime I talk about bilt, I just want to make sure you know that they're a sponsor. You would know that anyways, because I think an ad aired for them in this episode and most importantly, in any of these partnership agreements, I'm not agreeing nor would I ever agree to not be able to say whatever I want on the show. That's just not a stipulation. And that's really good today because, wow. I don't think BILT could have done a worse job launching these new cards if they tried. For every friend that texted me, it took me somewhere between five or 10 minutes each to kind of walk them through. My take on the BILT card, which, assuming you pay a rent or mortgage, is that it's actually a pretty good card. Though I have never seen a good credit card be so hard to make sense of. I've seen really bad cards seem good at first, but it's almost never the opposite. And so as of recording this on Friday, January 16th, Bilt took what was a confusing way to earn points on rent and mortgage and released an update that in the addition to the complicated earnings structure they launched just two days ago, there's now a second option that is a little bit more straightforward and maybe even more rewarding, but still confusing because the average person is going to have to compare it against the other option, which is confusing, and try to figure out which of the two makes sense. And it's not even clear to me which one might make sense. However, what is clear to me and the updated summary I'll give you is that for both cards, if you pay your rent or mortgage through Bilt, you will effectively be getting 1 to 1.33x points more on all of your spend up to the amount of your housing payments. I think the intent is to make it feel like you earn points on rent, you earn points on your mortgage. The way I interpret this is if you pay your mortgage, you earn more points on the built credit card by doing that. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have the built card, you're not really earning a lot of points on rent unless you live in a built alliance property, in which case there are other ways to earn points on rent, but the primary way you are able to earn points on rent or mortgage is by having the built card. And it's pretty great because the built Palladium card earns 2x on everything. And if you have your rent or mortgage, you can earn another one to 1.33x points on top of that, up to the amount of your housing spend. So if you have $50,000 of housing spend, then your first $50,000 in the card is effectively 3 to 3.33x points. That is awesome. And so I'm excited about that. I wish it didn't take me five to ten minutes to explain it to anyone. I wish that they could just simplify it so that anyone could make sense of it. But at its core, I think it's a good offering. It's just frustrating that it has to be so complicated. However, if you want to go deeper, come back next week. I'm going to run through all the build cards, the entire rewards program. It is not a sponsored episode. Built doesn't even know I'm doing it. I do genuinely think built points are amazing and so I'd probably trade all my Chase Amex Capital one points for built points if I could. And anyone listening, if you have a mortgage or a rent payment each month, I do actually think there's a strong case to consider getting one of these built cards, though I unfortunately feel like without a walkthrough, it might take a spreadsheet or a calculator for anyone to realize that they should. So that is happening next week and we're going to talk about the whole rewards program status and if there's time, I might jump into some of the other cards that cardless offers just so I can kind of, as I've done in these episodes where I jump into issuers, kind of put together a tier list of all the cards that are offered just so people can kind of understand all the offerings of that program. So we'll jump into all the cardless cards and the built cards and the entire built rewards ecosystem, which is actually something you can earn points on and transfer to their transfer partners without even having a built card. And I'll talk next week about how booking travel in the built portal is actually one of the only portals I will consider using if there's not some kind of lucrative promo or credit and how I do that to earn points. And you could even without a bill card. However, for the sake of existing cardholders, because there are decisions people have to make before the end of January, there are a couple questions that Brian and I didn't mention last week, which I thought I would Kind of quickly clarify around the credit report implications of getting the new Bilt card and or converting to the Wells Fargo autograph card, which is what happens for existing cardholders with their existing built card. So here's how I understand it. The account on your credit for your built card now will become a Wells Fargo autograph card if you don't cancel it beforehand. So it won't have an impact on your524 status in that it's not a new card that's being added. If you got your built card seven months ago, it will still count towards 524 because it already happened and it's on your credit report whether it's open or closed. And that the only impact you might have from keeping it is that you will prevent yourself from from maybe getting a welcome bonus on the autograph card since you already have it. The autograph welcome bonus is pretty low, so I'm not worried about that. And like I mentioned earlier in this episode, there is a pretty good use case for having a Wells Fargo card earning points. And so for me, I'm going to take my build card and I'm going to transition it to a Wells Fargo autograph card. It's also not the worst card. I'm looking right here, 3X on gas, travel, transit, dining, phone and streaming. So not a bad card to have. There might be a category in there, especially all travel given that so many other issuers are starting to convert travel to hotels and flights booked with the airlines instead of just general travel. So I'm going to keep that open. As for picking a new build card, as I understand it, you won't get a hard inquiry on your credit, but you will get a new account. So that will have an impact on your 524 status. It will show up as a new account that opened recently. That said, my understanding as of today is that you are eligible for the welcome bonus, which is nice. And whatever card you pick that you could change that pick, but not for the first year. So if you choose the Palladium card, you get the welcome bonus and a year later you decide you don't want that card, you can downgrade it. That is my understanding. I'm going to select the Palladium card as my card because I think the 2x is probably the most rewarding and the 50,000point welcome bonus I think is one that will outweigh the cost of the annual fee, at least for the first year. I have not made that selection yet because I am waiting for my credit to move back up because right now, as I mentioned earlier, it's in the mid-600s and I want to make sure that I don't get stuck with a small credit line. So hopefully in the next kind of 14 days when I have to make a decision, hopefully I can get that credit score up quite a bit before I have to make that selection and then I will be able to get that card without having to get what might be, might not be, but might be a smaller credit line. So that's my decision there. Stay tuned next week for a full deep dive on it all. If you want to go deeper on the build stuff sooner, I'm sure that the Frequent Miler team probably has put out an episode by the time this comes out and there are tons of blog posts. But I will do my deep dive and tier ranking of the build cards and the other cardless cards next week. That is it for this week. If you like this style episode, let me know if you want me to answer any questions you have. And that could be about points. Miles, travel, money, life, health, anything that's top of mind. Please go to allthehacks.com ama for Ask Me anything. That is it for this week. I will see you next week. Hablas Espanol spries to Deutsch Come de.
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