Bilt Limits Rent Day Double Points
Tl;dr: Starting on October 1st, there will be a 1,000-point cap on Rent Day double points.
Bad news for those who like to take my advice and save those big purchases for the first of the month to take advantage of double points on the Bilt card. In it’s most recent Bilt Day promotion, the company announced that as of October 1st, double points will be capped at 1,000. That’s down from a previous limit of 10,000.
This shouldn’t be a huge deal for most people most of the time. You’d need to spend somewhere between $334 (on dining) and $1,000 (on non-bonus purchases) to hit this new cap. But if you like to stock up on dining credits (e.g. by reloading your Starbucks card) or make a lot of big-ticket purchases on Rent Day, those benefits might not take you as far as they have in the past.
In fact, if you’re mixing dining, travel, and non-bonus spending, you might need to do some math to make sure you don’t spend too much. For example, if you wanted to buy, say, a $2,000 refrigerator, in the past it would make sense to hold out for rent day, when you could get 4,000 Bilt points. Now, though, you would only get 3,000. If you had already spent $100 on dining, you would only get 2,700, since you would have already received 300 bonus points on dining. In that case, it would then probably make more sense to use a card like the Capital One Venture X instead. With the Venture X’s double points on all base purchases every day, you’d get 4,000 Capital One miles, which, while not nearly as good as 4,000 Bilt points, is way better than 3,000 Bilt points. Plus you’d get the Venture X’s superior purchase protections (return protection and extended warranty).
Conclusion
This devaluation definitely hurts, and you’ll probably want to be aware of and work around it if you were planning on putting a lot of spend on your Bilt card on Rent Day. But if you were only spending a few hundred dollars with Bilt on the first of the month anyway, this change is unlikely to make a big difference to your points balance.