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To keep my Amex Gold and use my Bilt instead of my Apple Card for daily purchases and see how it goes.

The way it works is that you can pay your mortgage or rent via their payment portal (or they give you a routing/account number to use your company's payment portal). You have to have one of their cards to do this so in that sense, you have to have a Bilt credit card. You get up to 1.25 pts/$ for those payments depending on how much you put on their card as a percentage of the mortgage payment. There is a second way to get point also, which I'll describe below.

You earn 2 pts/$ of credit cards spend on the Palladium and differing amounts on the other cards. You also earn 4% Bilt Cash on top of that, which you can use in their ecosystem, which is limited as Ari and Nash mention below. But there are uses - to buy tickets in their travel portal, for example.

With Palladium you get a coupon book of credits too. Most seem bad but their hotel credit is good - I got $200 off a hotel in London for a trip I'm taking in December - so that's 2/5 of my annual fee right there. .

The other use for Bilt Cash is to buy points based on your mortgage payment. I'm not sure exactly how it works but I'm going to try to figure it out. I think you can switch between at any time.

The big things in favor of Bilt appear to be:

1. Paying rent/mortgage - usually your largest monthly expense, and getting points.

2. A very large number of transfer partners including a couple in the hotel space that don't have Amex or Chase (Accor, for example and 1:1 for Hyatt)

3. Very lucrative bonus transfers on the 1st of every month (one day only) that can double your transfers.

Here's a calculator for the mortgage payment choice:

https://www.maxmilespoints.com/bilt-calculator

Some other articles on it

https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/bilt-palladium-strategy-2026-update/

https://thriftytraveler.com/guides/points/bilt-cash/#earn-points-on-housing