The Bilt Obsidian Card has a reasonable annual fee, and is probably the Bilt credit card that seems the most worthwhile, on the surface.
Currently have Palladium. Are we able to downgrade after a year to the Obsidian? Does the Palladium make much sense after the first year once you have taken the welcome bonus out of consideration? I have always used my BILT cash to redeem the full amount of points on my rent payments. Now however my new rent payments are way way higher than they previously were. Am I able to redeem partial rent payments with BILT cash or do I need to have the BILT cash to cover the full rent payment in order to receive the points? Is there a scenario where the Alaska card via the BILT portal makes more sense to pay rent with (even though it charges a fee) than the BILT card? Especially if you don't have the BILT cash to get the full amount of points on the rent payment?
Don't you think the calculation is based on a person's mortgage or rent, and whether you want to fully unlock the 1x points on mortgage / rent? If your mortgage / rent is relatively low, you could probably unlock all the points with just restaurant charges so Obsidian makes sense. However, if your mortgage / rent is high, you'll probably need non-bonus spend to fully unlock the points. The Palladium is 2x on non-bonus categories while the Obsidian is 1x. For me, Palladium makes more sense since I need the spend on non-bonus categories to fully unlock the 1x on mortgage.
There’s gonna be a boatload of downgrades or cancellations after that AF hits in Jan/Feb ‘27… without a meaty retention offer, I think they’ll lose a ton of users, especially after they see their excess BILT Cash go unusable.
I agree it’s generally easier to leverage the Palladium’s 2x, but there’s not really a need to “fully unlock” the points.
Putting 75% of a large mortgage on Bilt is a bit like spending $50k on the Amex Gold just to max out dining, technically it's optimizing rewards, but certainly not required for good value. Anything from 0–75% still earns the added rent points incrementally, unless you’re specifically chasing the 1.25x multiplier.
Obsidian’s non-bonus earn is also effectively 2.33x if you pay rent/mortgage, which actually puts it ahead of most cards on everyday spend.
If you're paying rent from 2 diff sources, confirm that's good with your landlord. (A prior landlord declined me.)
If so, no reason you couldn't set your rent payment to maximize monthly bilt cash usage. Leave some cash for an xfer bonus or two.
bilt is a power spend base. CC cxls and dgs will hurt less than expected ime as many of those users have stopped spending as heavily (or at all) on their cards.
you're correct about future frustration over unused bilt cash. There are better ways to gamify monthly spend to reward rent a/o mortgage payments.
Even those transfer-bonuses got devalued to a degree, increasing the cost to use them from 75BC to 150BC, which I guess is one way to spend the glut of BC, but, still, it’s an admission by BILT that they really don’t want us to be able to use BC, and simply want us to think of it as worth its dollar value, when it’s maybe worth 25% at best, if we can even use it before expiration.
Currently have Palladium. Are we able to downgrade after a year to the Obsidian? Does the Palladium make much sense after the first year once you have taken the welcome bonus out of consideration? I have always used my BILT cash to redeem the full amount of points on my rent payments. Now however my new rent payments are way way higher than they previously were. Am I able to redeem partial rent payments with BILT cash or do I need to have the BILT cash to cover the full rent payment in order to receive the points? Is there a scenario where the Alaska card via the BILT portal makes more sense to pay rent with (even though it charges a fee) than the BILT card? Especially if you don't have the BILT cash to get the full amount of points on the rent payment?
There’s gonna be a boatload of downgrades or cancellations after that AF hits in Jan/Feb ‘27… without a meaty retention offer, I think they’ll lose a ton of users, especially after they see their excess BILT Cash go unusable.
bilt is a power spend base. CC cxls and dgs will hurt less than expected ime as many of those users have stopped spending as heavily (or at all) on their cards.
you're correct about future frustration over unused bilt cash. There are better ways to gamify monthly spend to reward rent a/o mortgage payments.
If you're paying rent from 2 diff sources, confirm that's good with your landlord. (A prior landlord declined me.)
If so, no reason you couldn't set your rent payment to maximize monthly bilt cash usage. Leave some cash for an xfer bonus or two.
Even those transfer-bonuses got devalued to a degree, increasing the cost to use them from 75BC to 150BC, which I guess is one way to spend the glut of BC, but, still, it’s an admission by BILT that they really don’t want us to be able to use BC, and simply want us to think of it as worth its dollar value, when it’s maybe worth 25% at best, if we can even use it before expiration.
Don't you think the calculation is based on a person's mortgage or rent, and whether you want to fully unlock the 1x points on mortgage / rent? If your mortgage / rent is relatively low, you could probably unlock all the points with just restaurant charges so Obsidian makes sense. However, if your mortgage / rent is high, you'll probably need non-bonus spend to fully unlock the points. The Palladium is 2x on non-bonus categories while the Obsidian is 1x. For me, Palladium makes more sense since I need the spend on non-bonus categories to fully unlock the 1x on mortgage.
I agree it’s generally easier to leverage the Palladium’s 2x, but there’s not really a need to “fully unlock” the points.
Putting 75% of a large mortgage on Bilt is a bit like spending $50k on the Amex Gold just to max out dining, technically it's optimizing rewards, but certainly not required for good value. Anything from 0–75% still earns the added rent points incrementally, unless you’re specifically chasing the 1.25x multiplier.
Obsidian’s non-bonus earn is also effectively 2.33x if you pay rent/mortgage, which actually puts it ahead of most cards on everyday spend.