recently revamped their credit cards, leaving Wells Fargo and switching to Cardless. The good news is that they now give rewards on mortgage payments in addition to rent. The bad news is that they require a lot of non-housing spend for you to “unlock” those rewards. Overall, the program is much more complicated than before, requiring you to carefully juggle housing and non-housing spending amounts on your card to make it barely possible to gain value above a simple 2% cash back card.
Importantly, separate from their original Bilt points, which are great and convert 1:1 to Hyatt points in addition to possible monthly transfer bonuses to other airline programs, they added a new thing confusingly called “Bilt Cash” which is nothing like cash at all.
I decided to convert to the new no-annual-fee Bilt “Blue” credit card as they offered me a “$100 sign-up bonus”, but this bonus turned out to be in Bilt Cash, which I haven’t been able to redeem for anything of value to me.
On March 1st only, Bilt is offering a Rent Day transfer bonus of between 25% to 100% to Japan Airlines. If you pay them $135 in Bilt Cash, they will let you bump up to an increased bonus percentage. So if you are on the base tier like me and only get a 25% transfer bonus to JAL, I could pay them $135 in Bilt Cash and make it a 50% transfer bonus. Possibly a good use of Bilt Cash and a way to use up your points, but again only on March 1st.
I wish I could explain the new program here simply, but I can’t. Personally, I have gone ahead and converted nearly all of my Bilt points to Hyatt, and will wait and see if things get better.
Related Posts
