Maximize your Bilt points

The Bilt card is pretty awesome. No annual fee. Arguably most valuable points you can get with a credit card. Points for rent with no transaction fees. Triple points on dining and double on most major travel purchases. Perks like cell phone insurance and concierge service. Just having it in your wallet can be very rewarding. If in a given year you spent $10,000 on rent, $3,000 dining out, and $7,000 on other purchases, you’d have a minimum of 26,000 points, good for $325 worth of travel through Bilt’s portal, a round-trip to many destinations with American or United, or at least 4 nights at lower-tier Hyatt hotels (even some where the cash price is around $200/night). 

So just having the card, using it normally, and taking advantage of the points-for-rent benefit puts you in a great place. But Bilt offers tons of opportunities to supercharge your points, and the most are incredibly simple. Here’s some things to be aware of if you’re new to Bilt (or considering adding it to your portfolio):

Set Up
Bilt offers a number of opportunities for points or other benefits by taking simple steps to link the card to merchants, partners, or social media accounts. When you get your card, you should:

Link your frequent flyer accounts. Bilt will give you 100 points every time you link your Bilt account to one of their transfer partners. If you have rewards program account with United, American, and Hyatt, you can earn 300 Bilt points just for connecting the two, even if you never transfer any actual points. Bilt currently has 11 partners, and signing up for an account with each is free and only takes a few minutes, so you could easily earn 1100 points (worth $10-20) just by getting signed up). 

Use your Bilt card to pay your phone bill. Bilt offers $800 worth of mobile phone insurance with a $25 if you pay your bill with the card, so be sure to use your card to pay your bill and cancel any other insurance you might be paying (unless you have another card that offers similar insurance, like the Capital Venture X, that makes more sense for you to use). 

Set up your Lyft account. By setting Bilt as your loyalty partner within the Bilt app, you’ll earn 5x Bilt points per dollar spent on Lyft rides. You’ll also earn a $5 Lyft credit after your third Lyft ride in any given month. 

Set up your Bilt wallet. Add your Bilt card to the Bilt wallet app and earn 100 points (plus add two more credit cards for another 100 points each). If Bilt dining is available in your area, you can earn 5x additional points (on top of the base 3x) when you eat at a participating restaurant with a card connected to your wallet. 

Link your Amazon account. You can redeem your bilt points for purchases at Amazon, although at 0.7¢/pt it’s a terrible value to do so. When Bilt announced the partnership last year, however, they did so with a promotion: get 250 points for linking your accounts, and another 250 for using them to pay for all or part of any Amazon purchase (even using 1 point to cover one cent of the cost). I do not see an expiration date on that promotion, so it’s worth linking them to see if it still works.

Get friendly with Bilt. Bilt uses social media to keep people informed of their (frequent) promotions and deals. On Instagram (and perhaps other platforms I’m not familiar with), you can go a step farther and become a “close friend” with Bilt’s profile. “Close friends” can see content not accessible to the general public. In the past few months, close friends have been able to receive 100 points for playing a quick maze game and 250 points for completing a 1-minute survey about home ownership and investment plans. To access these easy points-earning opportunities, simply message Bilt directly and ask to become a close friend.

Set Your Calendar
The Bilt card’s core value proposition comes from its unique ability to offer points on rent payments without the transaction fees that you would typically incur if you tried to pay your rent with any other credit card. And Bilt really, really leans into this identity by celebrating “Rent day” on the first of every month. Be sure to give yourself a reminder so you don’t miss out on these incredible benefits.

Rent day trivia. Each rent day, Bilt offers a short trivia challenge in the Bilt app. You can typically earn 250 Bilt points in less than 5 minutes if you’re on top of your trivia game. 

Rent day challenge. Bilt also offers a challenge each month, such as a word puzzle or, more recently, a find-the-hidden object game. These are typically announced about a week before rent day, submissions are due on the first of the month, and Bilt will randomly select winners the following day. Typically, Bilt will pay the winners’ rent (up to $2,500), but often other prizes are announced as well. While this may take a little time and your odds of winning are long, the game is a fun way to get in with a chance for big rewards.

Rent day benefits. The exact offerings vary from month to month, but Bilt regularly offers Bilt Rewards members rent day opportunities like elite status or bonuses on points. For instance, thanks to Bilt I got to fly with United’s silver status, which got me an upgrade to these fancy seats, a free checked bag, and priority baggage handling. 

Bilt has also offered three months of Hyatt “Explorist” status, and 100% bonus on transfers to FlyingBlue, Hawaiian Airlines, and IHG, among other perks. It won’t always make sense to take advantage of these offers, but it’s always worth knowing about them. 

Rent day double points. This is the big one. On the first of every month, Bilt offers double points on every purchase (apart from rent). Going out to eat? 6x. Buying a plane ticket? 4x. Everyday non-bonus spending? 2x. 

You certainly shouldn’t spend extra money just to earn those bonus points. But knowing that you’ll get double points once a month opens the door to all sorts of opportunities to maximize your points haul, depending on your imagination, patience, and willingness to do a little setup. Here are some ideas:

. This won’t be possible with every recurring bill, but it will be for many. Some allow you to choose and change your billing date. In other cases, you can cancel service, wait, and then restart on the first of the month, locking in that billing date. This approach might also save you money: as I went to cancel one of my subscriptions, they offered me a year of service for $10 if I didn’t cancel. I was paying $8 a month, so my attempt to get a few extra Bilt points instead saved me over $80. 

Delay your purchases. In some cases it will make sense to just wait until the first of the month to make a purchase. For example, if you add $50 worth of products to your Amazon cart on the 20th; if you can wait until the 1st of the next month to actually make the purchase, you’ll double your points, or you might save money if you decide you don’t actually need the purchase. This approach is particularly worthwhile with big-ticket purchases. A new $1,000 computer or sofa is typically a large, non-urgent purchase, and waiting a few days to purchase on rent day would net you a ton of points. 

Load up. Similarly, if you regularly load up stored funds, rent day may be the perfect time to do that. I usually reload my Starbucks card on rent day and get 6x points for my trouble. 

Book travel. Rent day is a perfect time to book travel, with Bilt’s 2x bonus becoming a best-in-class 4x. Flight prices are very dynamic, and hotel and rental car prices can be too, especially as travel dates approach, so unlike some other purchases it may be a bad idea to hold off on a purchase, especially a good deal, to wait for rent day. On the other hand, if you anticipate planning a vacation and need to set aside some time to search for flights, the first of the month might be a great time to do that. Similarly, if you booked a fully refundable hotel or rental car, it might be worth checking if the price is still the same; you could re-book with double points then cancel the original booking, doubling your points with no cost. 

Be Aware
In addition to all the points-earning opportunities above, Bilt has a ton of other perks you’ll want to keep in the back of your mind.

25% portal bonus. Your points go further when booking travel through the Bilt travel portal (which is, somewhat annoyingly, only available via the Bilt app). So a 10,000 Bilt points can be redeemed for $125 toward the cost of travel booked through Bilt. 

Point.me. If you’re interested in taking advantage of Bilt’s transfer partners but don’t want to scour half a dozen airlines’ websites for reward opportunities, you can use the Bilt app’s integrated miles-based search function. 

Concierge. The Bilt card also comes with free concierge service for help with things like travel plans and hotel reservations. For instance, when we went to Chile the concierge made breakfast reservations for us and confirmed that the restaurant could hold our bags for us while we ate, found a local gym with showers that we could use, and recommended local attractions. Note that the service itself is free but you will be charged for any costs incurred through the concierge (like hotel reservations or gift purchases).

Bilt properties. If you happen to be living in a Bilt-affiliated property, you can earn bonus points for signing or renewing your lease.

Credit boost. While rent payments normally do nothing for your credit score and history, using your Bilt card to pay rent can help build that history. But, conversely, Bilt also offers the opportunity to withdraw funds for your rent payment directly from your bank account rather than using credit, which can boost your credit score by keeping your credit utilization ratio low.

Tiers. Bilt has several status Tiers. Most notable about these is that once you earn 25,000 Bilt points in a given year, you will unlock Silver status through the end of the following year and start earning interest on your points balance. 

Perks. Remember that the Bilt card has no foreign transaction fees, primary rental car collision and damage insurance, and trip delay and cancellation insurance. 

Conclusion
While the Bilt card’s standard features alone place it among the best cards available, it also offers many ways to shift into points-earning overdrive, most with relatively lazy ease. If you don’t have the card yet, you can apply with this referral link.