Rent payment is a sore subject.
Every month you have to pull a hefty sum out of your pocket and hand it to the landlord. Credit cards, which give you a little flexibility and even earn cashback on spending, don’t work here — paying rent by credit card comes with some draconian fees ($60–90).
That was the case until, at some point, something called BILT launched — a credit card that lets you pay rent with no fees and even earn cashback (points).
On top of issuing a black metal card (just like Monobank), they also provided a “virtual” bank account for payments in places where their system didn’t work, so you could use it to pay utilities too, for example. The points didn’t pile up in huge amounts, but they weren’t nothing either — and as they say, “even vinegar tastes sweet when it’s free.”
To actually use those points you also had to make 5 purchases a month, so as Reddit puts it, it’s “the card for rent and coffee.”
Until the “improvers” decided to launch BILT 2.0 — three tiers: free, $100/year, and $500/year, with various hotel perks and whatnot.
But in this 2.0 system they add BILT Cash on top of the existing BILT Points and introduced some kind of interdependencies:
- you can pay rent with no fees
- but for every $3 of BILT Cash you can unlock 100 BILT Points, up to a maximum of 1 point per $1 spent
- or for a 3% fee you can choose the option to maximize your points
- and you can pay that fee using BILT Cash
….
What? Go f*** yourself.
A while back I decided for myself that the extra effort of tracking cashback isn’t worth it. And the feeling that someone is trying to confuse me with these cash-to-points conversions, make me think about it and crave it — that’s a game I have no interest in playing as a lab rat.
And although I’ll probably lose some benefits (plus the flexibility of paying the credit card within 50 days instead of on the day of the charge), I don’t want to support such murky schemes with my own money.
Put your money where your mouth is.
I won’t be opening that 2.0 card. Curious how many others will feel the same.