I’m Done With Bilt

Bilt dropped details yesterday about their new credit cards. I’ve been using the original Bilt card for a little over a year, mostly for one very specific reason, and after reading through the announcement I’m pretty confident I won’t be switching to any of the new ones.

I’ll probably just close the account at the end of the month and go back to paying rent directly out of my bank account.

The original Bilt card worked because it did one thing unusually well. It let you pay rent with no fee and earn points on it. You got an account number and routing number, gave that to your landlord, and rent came out like it was a checking account. One point per dollar on rent. Simple.

My rent is about $2,000 a month, so that came out to roughly 2,000 points every month. That’s not a ton of money, maybe $20 in value, but it was enough to matter in small ways. I mostly used the points for Lyft rides. Not flights, not aspirational travel redemptions, just “cool, this ride is free.” A couple of those a month was nice. It felt like getting something back for an expense that otherwise just disappears.

There was a catch, though. You had to make at least five non-rent transactions per month to earn the rent points. And I never wanted to actually use the Bilt card for real spending. It wasn’t competitive with my other cards, and I didn’t feel like thinking about it.

So I did what a lot of people probably did. I gamed it. I put five recurring charges on the card: iCloud storage for 99 cents, a few other subscriptions in the $5 to $10 range, and called it a day. Total monthly spend outside of rent was maybe $30. Rent was thousands. Points flowed.

From Bilt’s perspective, I was almost certainly a terrible customer.

Which is why none of this is surprising.

The new cards are clearly designed to stop people from using the product the way I was using it. Under the new setup, if you want to earn points on rent, you need to spend a lot more elsewhere on the card. Roughly 75% of your rent amount, from what I can tell. If your rent is $2,000, you need to put about $1,500 of other spending on the card every month.

That’s where it completely falls apart for me.

I’m not interested in rerouting $1,500 a month away from cards I already like just to preserve a rent reward setup that used to be effortless. Five token transactions was annoying but manageable. Rebuilding my entire spending strategy around one card is not.

And honestly, that’s fine. This feels very intentional. Bilt doesn’t want people who do the bare minimum, harvest rent points, and disappear. I was exactly that person. I don’t blame them for tightening things up.

But it does mean I’m done.

The new cards might be great for people who want a primary spending card and like the Bilt ecosystem. I’m not that person. I just wanted the rent thing to keep quietly working in the background, and it no longer does.

So I’ll take the small loss and go back to paying rent the old-fashioned way. No points, no Lyft credits, no Wells Fargo relationship I didn’t really want in the first place. It was fun while it lasted.

Adiós, viejo amigo.