Bilt LIED About Card Benefits? + NEW 200k Bonus!

In this video, I want to talk about four things. BILT has been telling lies about their new credit cards. The cards are charging foreign transaction fees when they shouldn't be. Then we have a new bonus worth over $1,300 on a certain Hyatt credit card, and bonuses on three more cards that were rumored to be coming out. And guess what? The rumors have come true. I'll tell you which cards they are and how big those bonuses are later in the video. Oh, and then we also have a little change to the options when you redeem Marriott Free Nights, which is a positive change. And I'll tell you about that as well. Hey, credit warriors. Welcome to the show. My name is Ben Hedges, aka The Credit Shoo-Foo. And on this channel, I cover U.S. credit cards, personal finance, and luxury travel. If you like the sound of that, please subscribe. But let's get into it. All right. So BILT recently launched their new BILT 2.0 cards, and it is a solid product offering, although there are some disappointing things. The main thing is that cardholders have to just use the cards a lot more on everyday purchases in order to qualify to earn points on their rent and mortgage payments. This led to annoyance early on, but then people did start to figure out the new BILT Cash system. It now shows up in your account as a separate currency, and you use $30 worth of BILT Cash to earn points on $1,000 worth of spending on housing payments. And the cards earn 4% in BILT Cash on everything, so it is quite easy to build up BILT Cash in your account. You can also exchange it dollar for dollar for several other things that actually offer better value than using it to unlock point earning on rent and mortgages. There's actually a lot of value to be had here, but I think BILT is just relying on the fact that they've now made the system so complex that many people just don't have the time to really look into it and realize its true value. But then there are other complaints, like how rent payments don't post to your credit balance anymore, they come directly out of your bank account, or people have found that the new way of paying rent with the card doesn't work at all. But anyway, there is a new complaint about the BILT cards, and that is this. Hidden 0.2% fee on foreign transactions. Now, BILT markets these cards as having no foreign transaction fees, but listen to what this person says. After seeing the earlier post, I checked my own statement and confirmed that my balance exceeded the sum of my transactions by a total of exactly 0.2% of my foreign transactions. Now listen to this explanation from the top commenter on the post who also encountered the problem. MasterCard offers a currency conversion calculator based on their rates. I had two foreign transactions on my current statement, one for 8 euros 50 and one for 6 euros 90. According to MasterCard, for the date of the transaction, they should have been reflected as 10.05 US dollars and 8.16 US dollars. Instead, I see 10.08 US dollars and 8.18 US dollars on my statement. The first matches exactly 0.2% over. The second doesn't, but 0.2% over would have been 8.17 and then 6 tenths of a cent, which rounds to the nearest penny at 8.18, which is 0.2% over. So this person used MasterCard's own tool to check what the exact conversion would have been on the particular date of their foreign purchase. This is what the tool looks like if you're interested with an example transaction in there. So this person could see what the final amount should have been, and they discovered that it was exactly 0.2% higher on one transaction and on the other 0.2% higher plus rounding up to the nearest whole cent. 0.2% is significant because that is actually the fee that MasterCard charges for foreign transactions. And cards that have foreign transaction fees build this 0.2% into whatever fee they charge, for example, 3%. And cards that have no foreign transaction fees usually just absorb this fee themselves. So it looks like on BILT cards, this fee has been passed on to the consumer for some reason. Maybe it's a mistake or a software glitch. Now, it seems that BILT now actually have issued a statement about this and they are acknowledging that this is a real thing. Let's take a look at that now. OK, so here is the statement that BILT issued and it was emailed, I guess, to someone who complained. And this may be an email template that's addressed from the CEO that BILT is probably sending out to everyone who's asking about this now. But here goes. We are aware of the questions surrounding final transaction amounts for foreign transactions and are actively reviewing this matter with our card partners that manage the program. There should be no change to foreign transaction fees versus the 1.0 card. And if any fees have been added, we will ensure our partners refund them. So by the looks of that, they're actively looking into it and I would imagine that this will get sorted out and they will issue another statement soon on how it will get resolved, a timeline for receiving refunds, etc. So personally, I don't think that it's going to be that big of an issue, but well done to those people for figuring this out. And I feel that this kind of thing could have easily been overlooked and gone on for a long time. Now, personally, I've been holding off on getting the BILT card. I initially wanted to get it to pay my mortgage with it and earn points. But after hearing about the issues with payments, Forbes is even now writing articles about how bad these payment issues have been. So I've been holding off until everything is smoothed out. But I have been using the BILT dining program and this adds an average of three points per dollar to spending at restaurants in the program, which is a lot of restaurants. I use my Amex Gold for dining normally, so I earn four Amex points and three BILT points for a total of seven points per dollar. It's such a no-brainer to sign up for. Even if you don't pay attention to it that much, sometimes you'll just dine at a random restaurant and discover that it was in the program and you earned extra points. Link is below if you want to sign up. Don't forget to link a card so you can actually earn points. Oh, and if you link your Lyft account, you can earn extra points on Lyft as well. All right, let's move on to a huge new bonus on one of the Hyatt credit cards. So there are two Hyatt credit cards from Chase, one personal, one business. And in fact, there are rumors of another premium card coming out soon. But anyway, this new bonus is on the business card. Let's check that out. Earn 80,000 points after you spend $10,000 on purchases within the first three months of account opening. So 80,000 points at 1.7 cents per point, which is what the points guy currently values Hyatt points at is $1,360. But I say currently values Hyatt points at because Hyatt adjusted its award chart recently. We did a video on it. It looks like this. I'll put it on the end screen of this for you to click on. And it wasn't for the better, okay? Many hotels will get more expensive. So this is what they do. They devalue, but then they increase the amount of points you can earn to keep enticing you into the system. In a year or two, we'll probably see 100,000 points on this card. But no matter what, you can still get some good deals redeeming Hyatt points. I've stayed at two of their all-inclusive resorts in Mexico, and they are awesome. Now the changes to the award chart will add two redemption levels for a total of five and cause many Hyatt redemptions to be a bit more expensive. But these don't start until May. So if you got this card now, did the spending for the bonus immediately, you might get the points before May and be able to book at the lower rates. Worst case is that if you don't manage to do that, your redemptions will be a few thousand points more expensive per night. This offer ends on April 30th. So do be quick if you want to get it. All right, let's now talk about two more things. First of them is three new bonuses. So a week ago or so, we uploaded a video about rumored bonuses on three Marriott cards from American Express. Well, these bonuses did turn out to be real and they are now available. So it just shows pay attention when we upload a rumor video, since these things do often turn out to be true. Anyway, let's take a look at what's on offer. So the first one is on the Marriott Brilliant card. That is their high-end card and it is 200,000 points for spending $6,000 in six months. Using 0.7 cents as the value for Marriott points, the value of the bonus is $1,400. That would get you a two or three night stay at a pretty nice Marriott hotel or a longer stay somewhere budget friendly. Then on their mid-tier Bevy card, they're offering 175,000 points for spending $5,000 in six months. The value of that is $1,225. So not far below that high-end card. Out of these two, I would probably choose the high-end one, the Brilliant. If I was in the market for a mid-tier Marriott card, I would probably go with Chase's Boundless card. It is a bit better than the Bevy in my opinion. Then there is one more and that is on the Marriott Business card from Amex and they are doing a five free night offer, but it's in two parts. Earn three free night awards after you spend $6,000 in purchases and an additional two free night awards after you spend an additional $3,000 in purchases on the card within the first six months of card membership. Each free night award has a redemption level up to 50,000 Marriott Bonvoy points for a total potential value of up to 250,000 points. This is actually potentially the most valuable out of all of them, but harder to max it out since you want to get hotels that cost either exactly 50,000 or slightly above. If you use it somewhere that's 40,000 a night, you lose that additional 10,000 points. Now there is a way that you can ensure you max it out and that is by topping up these certificates with extra points. Okay, we did say 50,000 or above to max it out and Marriott just made a change that makes it easier to top up your certificates with extra points so that you could stay at slightly higher end hotels. We'll talk about that in just a sec, but first, when do these bonuses end? Well, they end on May 13th, so you have two months if you want to get them. Okay, let's now look at Marriott's changes to redeeming free nights. So for a long time, you've been able to top up Marriott free night certificates with 15,000 or up to 15,000 Marriott points. It makes them easier to use, ensuring that you completely max out the value of the certificate by booking hotels that cost a little over 50,000 points or a little over whatever your certificate is worth rather than a little below since it's hard to find hotels that are exactly the amount on the certificate. Okay, certificates, the average probably is 50,000, but they also have 35,000 point certificates and 85,000 point certificates. But now they have improved that, okay, increasing that top up amount from 15,000 up to 25,000 and that is live now. So whoever has a Marriott free night certificate in your account right now, you can now top that up with up to 25,000 points, meaning if you have a 50,000 certificate, you can now stay at a hotel that costs up to 75,000 a night if you're topping it up. To be honest, this is probably happening because they've been devaluing Marriott points. So 15,000 isn't worth what it was a few years ago. But anyway, no matter what, this is a positive change. All right, guys, that's the video for today. Do check out the built dining program in the links down below. Don't forget to link your card so you can actually earn points. I'll also put my credit card quiz down below where you can answer a few questions and see which cards might be suitable for you. Check it out down below. And as always, we thank you very much if you do use our links. It helps us out tremendously. Please subscribe to the channel if you're new and we'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.