Frequent Miler on the Air - Bilt Palladium Review: 6 month checkpoint | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep364 | 6-26-26

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

In today's episode, we'll talk about Qatar's crazy new rules if you want to redeem rewards for friends & family, how Wyndham is going to devalue (but it might not be so bad), and we'll take a look back at the first 6 months of Bilt 2.0: The good, the bad, and where things stand now.Bilt Palladium Review: 6-month checkpointGiant Mailbag(01:13) - Gary Leff has a couple of minor interesting notes on our recent ‘question of the week’ podcast episodeFind our recent Question of the Week episode hereCrazy Thing: Qatar Airways Privilege Club(07:51) - Want to use Qatar Avios to book flights for friends or family? Good luck!Read more about this Qatar Avios restriction hereBonvoyed by Wyndham(15:36) - Learn more about Wyndham Rewards new award pricing hereAwards, Points, and More(19:43) - Learn about Bilt adding I Prefer 1:2 here(23:24) - Learn more about the Hyatt / Under Canvas Promo: 15% points rebate on award stays here(28:59) - Necker Island has new award pricing: 250K per night for 2 adults(35:08) - Random tips from NickMain Event: Bilt Palladium Review: 6 month checkpoint(41:16) - Background: Bilt changed card issuers and moved from 1 card to 3(51:39) - Palladium card details(54:10) - Bilt Elite Status details(55:41) - Bilt Cash details(1:01:48) - Nick's Review(1:10:49) - Greg's ReviewSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkFrequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's episode, we'll talk about Qatar's crazy new rules if you want to redeem rewards for friends and family. Wyndham is going to devalue, but it might not be so bad. And we'll take a look back at the first six months of Built 2.0. The good, the bad, and where things stand now. Frequent Milo on the air starts now. Today's main event, Built Palladium Review, six-month checkpoint.

The Built Palladium card has been out for about six months now, and when it came out, it was both too good to be true and too scary to use in some ways. We'll talk about why that is what our experience has been with the built Palladium card since we've gotten it. And if you want to jump ahead to that part of the discussion or you want to come back to something later, don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box and wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to leave us a review, leave us a like, give us a like, subscribe, enable

notifications. We want you to hear about what we post when we post it. Thank you very much for doing those things. Let's drag out this week's Giant Mail bag. All right. Today's Giant Mail comes from Gary Leff, the author of of the View from the Wing blog. Gary writes,

a couple of minor interesting notes on your recent question of the week podcast. Earning 5X on an airline credit card. I guess in the show we said we couldn't think of any that earned that much. So that was, again, specifically that was like an airline's own card when you use it to book airfare with that airline.

Gary says there are actually two. The city advantage executive card earns five advantage miles per dollar on eligible American Airlines purchases only after you've spent $150,000 on the card in a calendar year. Otherwise, it earns 4x. Hard to imagine doing this unless you're manufacturing advantage status using the card. And then he goes on to say JetBlue Plus, Premier and business cards earn 6x on JetBlue purchases. I really think that a JetBlue card holder on this podcast should have known that. Yeah, we're both JetBlue card holders.

Yeah. One of us. One of us should have caught that. But yeah, I'm the more recent of the JetBlue card holders. So you would think I'd be aware of the bonus categories on the card I've added to my wallet this year. Yes. I appreciate Gary pointing this out because I think, yeah, we had said something to the

effect of you. We couldn't think of airline cards that earned that many points per dollar on their own flights. But sure enough, there are a couple of options out there. So, you know, you might consider those. Although, I don't know, would you be putting your flights on these cards? If, I mean, even if you had them and you had a JetBlue flight to book or an American Airlines flight to book, would you choose to use one of these cards for your flight? And why or why not? I wouldn't use the City Advantage executive card because City won't let me get one.

Fair, fair. Well, I don't know. You got a Globe card. Maybe you can upgrade it. My JetBlue card, I mean, as long as I have the Sapphire Reserve. card which earns 4x ultimate rewards points and much better travel protections i would i would opt for that earning 4x with that versus 6x jet blue points yeah yeah that's the thing because the most of the airline cards don't feature the same travel protections so that's probably why this wasn't top of

mind but i'm glad that gary caught us on that because i think it's it's worth noting that those do exist yeah yeah and then uh gary goes on to say one additional portal plus worth noting, built gives one point per dollar on airfare booked through their site. And for many but not all airlines, it's NDC bookings that are serviced directly by the airline. So you could do Chase Safar Reserve or MX Platinum, earn those points for the airfare and an additional built point going through the portal. And he goes on to say, I've not recently checked on a current list of which carriers are booked direct through the portal. And I had forgotten about this, this NDC thing that Bill does.

So I did some flight searches on Bilt's portal to see which ones came up as direct bookings, because that would be awesome. I mean, you get the benefit of if things go wrong, you're still dealing directly with the airline, but you get the benefit of like a portal getting extra rewards for booking that way. What I found was, I only did like domestic searches, but I found that some united flights and fewer but some Delta flights were indicated as direct bookings, but lots of flights with those same carriers were not direct bookings. There's a little like lightning bolt indicator telling you which ones. I couldn't find a way to filter by that or search for that. So it's more just like you've got to use your eyes and look for that lightning bolt to see if one of those flights meet your needs.

That's all I could find just with a quick search. But, you know, if it works for you, I think that's a nice addition. Another thing that Gary's note triggered for me is a reminder that Rove does the same thing, that some of their flight bookings are NDC and you earn an extra Rove mile per dollar. So it's almost exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, I reached out to Rove to ask, like, how would the end user know which bookings are direct and which are not? And the answer was, basically, you don't know. That they kind of spun it as a feature instead of a bug saying that we want the checkout process to be seamless for all our customers.

So basically, they don't want you to know that it varies, I guess. I don't know. I find that unfortunate because I would certainly go through Rove if it had NDC, if I knew it was an NDC booking. Right, right, right. Yeah, it's too bad that it's not easily identifiable, though, you know, I suppose neither alternative is good, right? I mean, you know, because if you can't filter to it or easily search for it, it's of

limited use. Like maybe that's better than Rove, you know, with Rove, not. showing it at all, but it's marginally better. It's like a wild experience. It's better. It's better. It's better because if you're going to book a, if you know you're going to book a paid flight, you can always go over to Bill and just run that same search, find that exact flight that you're going to book anyway, see if it's direct. And if it is, why not earn another point per dollar? Of course, if you don't care that much, whether it's a direct booking, then you could either book that way anyway or go through your bank's portal to potentially get a lot more miles

that way. True, true. Yeah, I would love to see this expanded to more airlines. And when when built first talked about this about a year and a half ago, it sounded like they expected most airlines to go this route. And that doesn't seem to have materialized. Same thing with the hotel bookings through built. It sounded in the beginning like they intended for most hotel chains to be direct booking. And we haven't heard much about that in the last year and a half since It's just the home away from home bookings appear to be direct. But beyond that, I've not found, I don't think anything in recent memory that showed up that way. So it's worth keeping an eye on both.

And hopefully those things expand, but limited use at this point. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Guitar Airways Privilege Club do this week? Now, this is so crazy. I haven't even wrapped my mind around it.

So I'm hoping you have because they added a. bunch of strict rules that like I was I couldn't I couldn't understand it in the first rate yeah yeah I mean get ready buckle up because this is this is totally nuts um yeah Kutart really really wanted to get into the segment and so the purpose behind this is apparently to combat mileage brokering which we've talked about on other shows how it's a big problem for award booking uh that mileage brokers kind of you know book up all the valuable flights and uh Anyway, so they've implemented these strict new rules that if you want to use your Qatar avios to book flights for anyone besides yourself, so you want to include your family

or friends or books separately for your family and friends, good luck. Good luck out there. Let's start with the first step. Step number one, there are some mandatory requirements. They're like, you want into this club? that allows you to book for someone else? First of all, your account has to be at least 30 days old. Okay, easy, no problem there.

Second one, not so easy. You have to prove earning activity in one of two ways. You must have credited at least one flown flight to Qatar Privilege Club. So meaning it could be a flight on Qatar itself, or it could be a flight on one of its partners, American Airlines, whatever. whatever. But you have to have credited that paid flight to Qatar Privilex Club so that you earn miles from an actual flight. Or you have to have made at least one eligible transaction on a co-branded Qatar credit card. So cardless has a couple, I think it's cardless, right, has a couple

Qatar credit cards out there. So you have to have one or the other. So I'm disappointed that you had to ask if it was cardless. It's with all the alliteration there, the cardless guitar card. How can you forget the cardless guitar card? But wait, so you said credit at least one flight to Qatar Away's Privilege Club, like when? Like when in the last year? Yeah, unclear. Unclear. So I've read the terms and conditions. There's no indication about when. So I did reach out to a Qatar contact to ask, but I haven't heard. heard back yet because it, the way it's phrased, it sounds like you could have done this 30 years ago and it would count. So it seems to be ever, and we'll talk more about that in workarounds here.

Okay, so now you're eligible, right? You've flown a fly, you've signed up for credit card, whatever you did to make yourself eligible. Now, in order to book for anyone else, they have to get on one of your two lists, either on your family and friends list or your my list. Your family and friends list can have up to six people on it, but they can't be privileged club members. So, yeah. So if you want to add your son, your two children to this list, that would be a problem if they have privilege club accounts. And I don't know how they check or whether they try to check, you know, but supposedly they can't be members. All right. So, up to six people that way. Or you can create my list. And I don't mean Greg's list when I say

my list. I mean, it's called my list. There you could have up to four people on the list, but they have to be adults and they have to be privilege club members. So no adding your kids to this list. What sense does this make? I mean, in what world does this? First of all, after you went through the fact that you had to credit a flight or have the card, and then you added my more. I was like, wait, there's more than that. That's not enough. But then this makes no sense. So you have to associate with people who are not guitar privilege club members, basically, because your family and friends could not have joined. So don't tell anybody about guitar Airways privilege club, because if they join, then, well, they, if they join and they're adults, you can add them to my list.

Right. But only four of them. Right. Let's not get crazy. Don't tell everybody. If you're in a big group, you have to have some people join and wait 30 days or whatever. And also to get out of any of these lists or to boot someone out. There's a six-month, like, period before they could join any other lists. Wow. Yeah, it's a tight club you'd be in to be able to get booked. Now, as far as those requirements of flying or having a credit card, you know, I was trying to think about are there workarounds to those things.

I think the most obvious workaround is don't book your awards through Qatar Airways. Check. I mean, and I'm not really kidding because Avios, you're allowed to move them to other Avio's programs. And most awards can also be booked from British Airways. So you can move your points of British Airways, which doesn't have all these requirements and book there. Not all of them, though. So Qatar does reserve some, like, better awards. space for themselves. I think they have some partners that British Airways doesn't have,

things like that. So, you know, it's not a perfect solution, but at least that would be my starting point to see whether British Airways has the same pricing or same availability for the awards. You could, of course, you know, go out of your way to make sure you fly at least one partner of Qatar sometime on a paid flight and just credit that to your privilege club. and it looks like that'll be then good forever, so you unlock that ability forever. That's an easy way to do it. Another option that I think is actually not that bad is sign up for the cardless guitar Airways Privilege Club signature credit card. This is the cheaper of the two.

It has a $99 annual fee, but it has a first year 40K welcome bonus. So 20,000 points after first transaction, 20,000. more points after a $3,000 spend in 90 days. So, you know, getting a one time, it's not a huge bonus, but getting this one time 40,000 point bonus for the $99 annual fee ain't bad, you know, and cancel the card next time the annual fee rolls around so that you don't have to pay that annual fee again. And if we're right that this is a lifetime thing, that should unlock your guitar bookings forever and ever. So there you go. Right. So long as you're you create on my list or have family and friends who aren't members, it will unlock

your ability to put awards for others. You got to pick your friends carefully. Right, right, right. I mean, make good choices out there, folks. All right. So that's, that makes no sense at all. But you know what? Truth be told, the number of Qatar was award bookings I've made in the last few years means that this won't be probably much of an issue for me anytime soon. So I have not, uh, not been regularly using their program. anyway. And Qatar's working hard to keep that trend as is. Yes. Yes. We will keep the streak alive. Katar. Thanks for the help. All right. Next up, let's talk about being Bonvoid by Wyndham. So Windham Bonvoid folks, or is Bonvoy about to bonvoy us in September? How is that? Yeah. Well, so they have three

award tiers right now. Right now, hotels are either priced at 7,500 points per night, 15,000 or 30,000 points per night. They're moving from those three tiers on September 15th of 2026. They're moving from those three tiers to four tiers. There is good news. The bottom tier is going to change from 7,500 points to 5,000 points. So that goes down quite a bit. and the 15,000 and 30,000 point tiers remain, and they're introducing a new 45,000 point tier. So that's where the bonvoying is happening. Now they tell us this will be for a small number of our most elevated hotels.

Kind of reminds me of how when Hyatt introduced category eight hotels, it was for a very small number of. of hotels and then grew from there. So, yeah, so, you know, anyway, the point is the top price will go up quite a bit. That goes up by 50%. Good news, bookings made prior to this update will be honored at current rates. So book those expensive bookings before September 15th. And also good news, they say that if a hotel's award rate drops, the difference in points

will be automatically returned. So that is if you book before September 15th, and the price actually goes down, they'll refund the difference. So that's good news. They also told us things are going to shuffle around. So you shouldn't assume that hotels that are right now in the 15K bucket, for example,

will stay in the 15K bucket. They could go down or up or wherever. And they did not have for us any information about how many hotels were going up or down. Or which ones. Yeah. Well, I got to say, I feel skeptical that there will be many 15K properties that go down to 5K, like the drop on price by 2 thirds. So that seems pretty unlikely. Now, we might see some 30K properties drop to 15, but I would buckle up for more properties going up than down likely. It seems like that's the only direction they could probably go. But now, while I'm disappointed to see a 50% increase in. award pricing hard stop there disappointing to see that with the top tier i mean 30k to 45k i guess somewhat mitigating this is the fact that the new cards now offer better award discounts right so

the premier card would see the award discount on that is am i right is it 25% 25% yeah so on the 45k you're taking 11k off or whatever close to a little bit more than that i guess so so you're paying about 33K for those properties if you got the top tier card, which is more than what you'd pay today, you know, beforehand, because if you had a Wyndham card prior to the launch of those new cards and everything, you got a 10% discount. So really that costs you 27K before. But it's less of an increase if you are going. That's a really good point. Anyway, so also, you know, a little bit less painful. Kudos to them for not abandoning like fixed award pricing. They point out in their email to us that they are not changing prices based on seasonality.

You know, so when hotels are extremely expensive, the, you know, the price is fixed. So that's good news. And we would like to see more of that kind of fixed pricing across hotel chains. But more and more, actually, we're seeing less of that. So at least we've got to give them, you know, kudos for that. Absolutely. I agree. All right.

That's all the kudos you got, though, went to. All right. Let's move on to awards, points, and more. So an awards point some more this week. Built has added a new transfer partner. They added I prefer at a one to two transfer ratio. So that's the privileged club or I'm sorry, privileged club. Preferred hotels loyalty program is I prefer.

One to two ratio. How excited are you about that on a scale of one to two? Zero. I mean one. I mean, it's always good to have more transfer partners. And this one, it's not bad. It's just that city and Capital One. both have the same transfer ratio.

If I was going to use points to, you know, send to I prefer at that ratio, I'd much rather do it with one of the other programs, which I value less than my built points. The, you know, and I prefer at one to two is not a good bet in general. There are times where you can get good value from that, but it's not even close to what it was like when City used to offer. one to four transfers I prefer than there were often great deals. At the one to two, I mean, we saw the average I prefer value being at about half a cent each. So talking about getting one cent per point from built points. But, you know, at least we know whenever built adds a new transfer partner, the next rent day transfer bonus is to that. And so surely the next, the next next next rent day transfer bonus will be.

Is to Hilton. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's go to a lodging partner.

I guess that's how we should have led that. The next one will be to a lodging partner. Just not I prefer. Yeah. I mean, how weird. So July 1st, the rent day transfer bonus from built is going to be to Hilton. You can get up to a 200% transfer balance. Wow.

200%. you get up to 100%, but 200%, are you going to, are you going to move all of your Hilton, all your built points to Hilton at 200%? No, not at all. Yeah. No, not going to transfer any points at that rate because, of course, Hilton points are just not worth much of anything anymore. So we recently redid our reasonable redemption value and Tim found they were what,

0.35 cents per point. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So around a third cent per point. So with a 200% transfer bonus, that means you will get for each built point. You get three Hilton points.

So you're basically getting an average of around one cent per point value for your bill points, which, again, is just not good. Now, you can do better. There are definitely Hilton awards that are more valuable than that. But even if you think about the fact that Hilton often sells their points for half, a cent each when they're on sale, that at best, this is worth, you know, one and a half cents per built point because you could have bought those three Hilton points for, you know, 1.5 cents. So anyway, so yeah, it's a terrible deal. Do not transfer your built points to Hilton.

No, yeah, there's just not even a realistic transfer bonus that they're going to run to Hilton that would be worthwhile. So, you know, unless they come out with a three or 400 percent transfer bonus, which I don't see as being likely, then you just can pass on the Hilton ones. Yep. Yep. All right. Next up, though, Hyatt is out with a new promotion for Under Canvas, which is their sort of glamping brand, right? So, you know, the glamorous camping. 15% points rebate on award stays. So you got to register and book by November 30th. You got to complete your stay by December 1st. What do you think? Is that exciting, interesting? I mean, if you have a state of book, obviously, it is. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's good news because, so under Canvas operates under the Mr. and Mrs. Smith approach to

award bookings with Hyatt, which is to say that the point price is based on the cash rate and we, you know, rarely see better than about 1.3, 1.4 cents per point value. With the 15% points rebate, like Stephen looked at a couple examples and was seeing, you know, after the rebate that he'd be getting around 1.6 to 1.7 in that range, cents per point value for high at points, which, especially after the latest highest, Hyatt devaluation, is actually very solid. So, you know, to the extent that they do this kind of thing and maybe they'll, you know, maybe someday they'll extend it to Mr. Ms. Smith for a promotion there, or maybe it's a hint of what might

become available if Hyatt ever releases their new credit card, you know, maybe we'll be seeing kind of rebate type things like this, then it could make your Hyatt points reasonably valuable for these kind of non-traditional award bookings. And so I like it for all those reasons. Obviously, yes, if you're going to book a Hyatt under Canvas property, which I came really close to doing for a stay that would have totally worked. But we found a place that we preferred. That's not one of these anyway.

I'll mention that Hyatt has been running a lot of unconstitutional. under-canvas promos lately. Some of them are just about to end or ended recently. Some of them are still going throughout the summer, but they're based on paid stays. Like, so, for example, you can earn an extra one American Airlines mile per dollar. You can earn, if you're a Wyndham card holder, you can earn 11 bonus points per dollar,

on top of the points you'd earn it anyway. So there's other under-canvas things going on there, which makes me think they're not. selling as many of those rooms as, or tents, uh, as they had hoped to. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, so I guess either way, whether you're getting the 15% discount or the, I don't know, 11 bonus points per dollar, which would you rather get? Would you rather be using your points at 1.6 or earning at 11 points per dollar? Yeah, I don't know. I when I was, I haven't really thought through that yet, but, um, I mean, 11 bonus points per dollar is really attractive. And, and when I was going to book one of these,

that I mentioned before. It was before this award rebate came out. And I was definitely going to take advantage of the 11 bonus points per dollar and earn American Airlines miles per dollar. It's pretty attractive combo. Yeah, yeah, interesting. All right, but it's not the only promo that Hyatt is running right now. They also have another promotion to earn 2,000 bonus points for every two nights,

starting with your second stay, right? Right, right. So, you know, it's sort of nice. and easy if you're going to be staying multiple times at Hyatt's. The biggest downside is the most you could earn is 8,000 bonus points. So there's not big upside of this. You do need to register by September 1st and your stay must be by September 7th. I do want to make note of a few things. One, award stays count. So this would stack with the under-canvas rebate if you do that. But The other thing is that even though it's based on your second stay, the number of points you earn are based on nights.

So you could have one night's day, and then your second stay could be, what is it, two times four. So it could be eight nights long for one stay, and you could earn the max 8,000 bonus points that way. You know, that is so relevant for me. I just pulled up the Hyatt app because literally Saturday I'm checking in for an eight-night stay at a Hyatt property. Oh, no. And that would be my first stay. So now I'm thinking I need to book a Hyatt for tomorrow night somewhere because, yeah, oh, man, I had not even paid attention to that. But now I'm like, oh, I can pick up all those bonus points. But is it worth booking a night to mattress run that. Probably not, because it would probably cost me more than the 8,000 bonus points to do that.

But oh, burn there. Yeah, that's a shame. It's lucky it's not a better promo because that would hurt a lot more. It would. It would. Although it might make the mattress run night more appealing if that were the case. That's true. But that's that.

So register. Make sure you register if you're interested in taking advantage of that one. All right. Next up, we've got Necker Island has new award pricing available, and it might be more attractive for some people. Yeah. So Necker Island is Richard Branson's private island that for many years, you could book with Virgin Atlantic miles for a week. They had certain weeks set aside. They called Celebration Weeks. And when I first became aware of it, it was like a million Virgin Atlantic Miles for a week for two people, all inclusive. Then when my wife and I actually did it, we went and did a week on Neckar Island.

It cost 1.2 million Virgin Atlantic miles. And then over time, the price kept changing and the requirements kept changing. At one point, they added the requirement they had to have elite status. They changed the price to like $2 million or somewhere in that range. Then they did things where the price was a combination of points plus like $5,000 or $6,000, somewhere in that range. So now they have settled for now, and I want to stress that part, for now, on 250,000 points per night, minimum three nights. So you have to spend at least 750,000 points, spend three nights. The nice thing is, instead of having these fixed celebration weeks dotted throughout the year, which may or may not have corresponded with when you want to travel, they now have the standard season.

is anywhere from January 1st to December 19th. So the vast majority of the year. Now, that doesn't mean that every day of that period is available for these bookings, but it could be. And as far as I could tell, the only way to find out is to actually contact them to ask

about the dates you're interested in. Interesting. And so, yeah, so if you want, you know, three nights, you pay 750,000 points. You want, for every night above that, you pay another 250,000 points. Again, that's for double occupancy. And there is that period from December 20th to December 26 is available for this,

but you have to pay more than it's $300,000 per night and minimum three nights. Now, I need to say a few things about this one. You know, is it worth it? That's my question. If you're really flush with points, I can honestly say that this is an experience of a lifetime. At least it was for my wife and I. It was, it's not, if you're looking for the utmost luxury, it's not really that. It's not really about luxury, although it is, there's a lot of things luxurious about it.

Don't get me wrong. You'll be very comfortable. You'll be pampered and everything. But it's just not really about luxury. much as you're getting taken to this island where Richard Branson actually works and plays there. You'll probably have the opportunity to play tennis or chess with Richard Branson. He hangs out at some meals and some, they run parties for the guests. He's frequently doing his windsurfing right in front of the guests when they're hanging out by the beach and things like that.

They have tons of water sports and they have experts who will train you in different types of water sports if you want to do that. I had an absolute blast. We made good lifetime friends that there's a couple in England that we see fairly regularly all these years later. I can't promise that it'll happen to you, but it was truly an opportunity of a lifetime one that we would have never ever paid cash for. And that's one of the things I love about points in miles is that unlock the ability to do some things like this that you would never pay cash for. And so, yeah, so all right, all that said, so keep in mind that transfer bonuses to Virgin Atlantic are really common. 30% and even 40% transfer bonuses from various transfer old points currencies are really common. So that can bring down the price of this considerably.

you still need, obviously, a lot of points to make it happen. So that's a consideration. Okay, one last question. You talked about a lot of things to do there. What's the minimum number of nights that you would recommend? If I wanted to go, I'm not going to go. But if I wanted to go to Naccar Island and kind of get the Naccar Island experience, can I do that?

Would you do that for three nights? Or would you recommend a minimum of some amount? No, I would. I would book, I would probably, you know, book something else this is in the British Virgin Isles I'd probably book some other stay to to round out the week or however long I'm staying in the British in the BVI or in any nearby islands I guess but I think three nights would would be enough to get a lot of the fun in so you probably probably because of the way it's organized you're probably less likely to make lifelong friends

because when I did it, we were all arriving at the island together. You know, we get off the flight and they load us onto a motorboat to take us over to the island. And that's when you start meeting people right on the motorboat, holding champagne. They give you champagne like every two minutes on the island. And also there's all these great animals. They have a whole lemur colony, like all these different types of lemurs. And you can, for the gentle ones, you can walk into the cage and they'll stand. on your shoulder and you can feed them and things.

So if you're an animal lover too, great things there. So it is adults only though. Oh, wait. No, it's not. Sorry, it's not adults only. But if you want to add kids beyond the two primary people, you're going to pay a lot. It was expensive. Yeah.

Yeah. I remember that now that you mention it. Okay. All right. Cool. A couple quick random notes from me before we skip ahead to the main event. Random notes from next. So first of all, I wanted to make a brief mention of Southwereux.

Seat Seat Selection. I've talked a few times about picking seats on Southwest as a premium card holder. So if you've got the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority Consumer Card or the Performance Business Card, those are the two higher-end Southwest cards. You can select extra legroom seating 48 hours prior to departure if it's available. And so I've talked about mixed experience with this. And because I just selected seats this morning for a flight that I'm going to take 48 hours or so from now, I want to just report back on a couple of quick observations. So I'm on a two-leg itinerary. The first leg opened the extra leg room seating at exactly the 48-hour mark. The second leg, ordinarily, and I say ordinarily because this has varied, but ordinarily it seems that Southwest is opening

seats 48 hours prior to departure of the leg, the individual leg. That's very unusual, but yeah. Yeah. So it's not at 48 hours prior to like, the it's confusing because it's not a net check-in thing like it is with other airlines. Yeah. It's the 48-hour mark. So it's, you can't select the extra legroom seats usually on the second leg until 48 hours before that like.

However, I've mentioned before that sometimes it's a little more than 48 hours. And sure enough, yet again today, I found that about 49 and a half hours before that second leg, I was able to select the extra legroom seating for the whole family. So, uh,

so I wanted to mention that because if you're flying Southwest this summer, if you're not terribly familiar, with the new process, you've got one of those cards. It's worth checking in the hour or two before you expect to be able to pick extra legroom seats because I've found a number of times now that I've been able to select a little bit more than 48 hours in advance. And that obviously gives you a better chance of actually getting those extra legroom seats than somebody who was waiting until the 48 hour mark.

So good luck with that out there. Second note, MGM, Las Vegas. So I have an upcoming stay in Las Vegas. and I have this built hotel credit that I haven't used yet and is going to expire. And there are a couple of hotels with good pools in Las Vegas. One of them, not an MGM. The Golden Nuggets got a water slide with sharks in it. And so I thought, well, you know what?

Maybe I'll just use the built hotel credit. Book a couple of nights there so we can go and spend a day at the pool and have a room to go back to and shower and change and not actually necessarily stay the night. But I could use my built credits that way. And so I looked at doing that at the Golden Nugget. and then I looked at doing that at an MGM property. And so I was pretty sure I was going to do that with my built hotel credit. But before I did, I decided to check around prices through like FHR,

because some of those places are on hotel collection and whatnot. And then I said, you know, let me just log into my MGM account. I haven't logged into my MGM account in, I don't know, a year or two probably. I haven't been to an MGM property in years at this point. I don't think, not that I can recall. Sure enough, I logged into my MGM account, even though it's been inactive, I've got no points, no status, no nothing. I had a whole bunch of offers for up to three complimentary nights at a bunch of the different

MGM properties. So I booked three free nights. Yeah, three free nights with a $20 resort credit at one of the MGM properties. Just to use the pool. Now, I'll go and try to do a status match because I have Caesar's Diamond Plus. So I should be able to status match to MGM gold in Las Vegas. So I won't have to pay the resort fee either. So rather than use the built hotel credit, I'll just get a free stay that we can go and use the pool when we want.

Yeah, yeah. But then you're not getting value for your built cash. Well, that's, yeah, I got to, now I still have to figure out what to do with the built credit because that's not going to be it, unfortunately. And that's not actually where we're staying. We have an FHR stay booked in a room that, with a view that I wanted. And so, so I'm not even not even using the free stay, really, unfortunately, but apart from being able to use the pool. But, but I wanted to mention that because if you haven't logged in your MGM account forever, you're like, you're going to go to Las Vegas. log in and check the prices there before you like book anything.

Yeah. Now you pass right over the most interesting part. You said, there are sharks in the pool. I want to know more about that and why you're okay having your kids when I'm in a pool with sharks. So that's the golden nugget. And we ended up not doing that because I have this free MGM stay.

And they've got a couple of the MGM properties have really good pools also. But the golden nugget, yeah, they've got a shark tank in the pool. And so there's a water slide that goes through the shark. Okay, Greg, the shark tank is like around the water. fine. All right. So you're actually going into the shark tank. But it looks pretty cool. I thought the kids would enjoy it. But yes. Another time. Some day. Someday. Yeah, that's been one of those things. I've been like, I someday I'm going. Someday I'm going to stay at the golden nugget for a night or two. Just check out the pool. And I never have it's downtown in Las Vegas for people who aren't familiar with Las Vegas. So it's not on the strip. So it just never ends up being where we end up going. But one of these days, we will. Anyway, anyway, so I thought that was cool. Finally, speaking of FHR, I said that I'm, I'm staying at an FHR. A couple, actually, two. two different FHR properties in Las Vegas. And I wanted to mention that you should track the prices of your FHR bookings. Now, this is something I regularly do with other properties, other hotel bookings and

things. I don't usually think to double check on the prices on FHR bookings. A lot of times are pretty static. But my goodness, I have rebooked three times this week for Tuesdays in Las Vegas that have changed prices three times. So, and I was a little over the $300 on a couple of those reservations. So I'm getting that money back. So I just thought it was worth saying you should use a tool like, you know, any one of these hotel price tracking tools that we mentioned, don't forget to do that for your FHR stays too.

I thought that was worth a mention because I don't usually imagine that. Yeah, that's a great tip. I have an FHR stay in the fall that I have not done that. I haven't done anything to try to track the prices. So I need to look at that for sure. Yeah. Okay. That's that.

All right. We'll be back right after this with our main event. Hey, Nick, I just got a text from my cousin. He's asking me about a credit card offer he just got in his email and asking if it's any good. Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequentmiler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare and make sure you're getting the best possible. offer. And we're back with today's main event. Built Palladium review six month checkpoint.

All right. I have to give some background about the built palladium card. It was part of built change from built 1.0 to built 2.0, which happened the beginning of this year, 2026. Built changed card issuers. They used to be with Wells Fargo. They changed to card. and they moved from having one card to three different cards. We got some like a preview of what the cards were going to look like. And I know that for Nick and I, we looked at the details of the palladium card, which is what we're talking about today in the main event. And, you know, my reaction was, wow, this is unbelievable.

This is like the best thing ever to, it. It offers a base, you know, two points per dollar everywhere, plus 4% built cash for all your spend. And so if that built cash is worth anything, you know, and this was before we knew what built cash could be used for, if it was worth like anything, that means it's better than a 2X Everywhere card. And plus it's earning built points,

which are more valuable than any other programs we could earn 2X everywhere. So I know that Nick and I, like, our reactions were like, wow, this is awesome. Right? And, but we're kind of surprised when Stephen didn't have the same reaction. No, definitely didn't. I think it didn't have the same reaction as putting it mildly.

Stephen was extremely skeptical right off the bat, right? From day one, he was like, nah. Yeah, we had all of these slack internal discussions about the card. and, you know, Nick and I were like sort of reeling off like, wow, we can do this. We can do that, blah, blah, blah, blah, how great it is. And Stephen was like, this is the worst thing ever. We're just like, what? We were like, what are you talking about, Stephen?

I didn't, it didn't make, I could see being less enthusiastic than you and I were perhaps. But it was like a, but it's 2x plus anything. If that 4% billed cash is worth anything, then it's better than all the other 2x cards, right? Yeah. I mean, even at just 2x. it's better because yeah because the points are better yeah yeah um and so we went back and forth back and forth um Tim Tim like barely participated in that conversation except to say he was he was

kind of on Stephen's side and and so you know we worked hard to try to understand what where Stephen was coming from here and ultimately it came down to he was very skeptical about Bilt's uh ability to actually pull this off. He didn't trust that Bill would actually deliver on these promises. He thinks, you know, earning 2x plus 4% of nothing is nothing, you know, and so, I mean, that's to put it at extreme. And he pointed to sometimes when Bill didn't work out for people in the past. And, you know, so I think he was very focused on the things that built as an organization had done. wrong or maybe arguably deceptively in the past, whereas I think Nick and I were much more focused

on the fact that, like, Bill had made a lot of promises in the past about, like, adding new transfer partners and having big transfer bonus, and they delivered on all those things. So we were very bullish on the built platform. Stephen was very negative about the built platform and saw everything from that lens. And then the rollout happened. And then did that change anything? Yeah, I mean, it changed the size of the smile on Stephen's face. That's what it did.

Because it just grew and not because Stephen was rooting for things to go wrong. Let me be clear. But I mean, more so that Stephen was proven right. I mean, there were just there were blunders left and right, built and cardless wasn't prepared for that launch. I mean, we were kind of, I think, taken it back by the fact that Bill didn't even seem to have worked out how the 4% built care, how the built cash was going to be used. what it was going to be worth and what the limitations and uses were going to be. When they launched it, they didn't, they legitimately didn't seem to know. And I can totally understand how somebody on the outside would think that there was this nefarious plan and they knew exactly how you were going to be able to use it.

But they just didn't want to share it. They wanted to keep it a secret. But I legit think they just didn't know when they launched it, which was mind boggling. And then, of course, like when the card launched, people were having issues and problems. And we kept getting reports from people about just. the rollout didn't go smoothly and customer service was nowhere to be found in the beginning. It was like people were waiting for hours online to chat and there was nobody to call. It was messy.

It was very messy. And then one of the worst things in my mind, one of the worst responses that Bill had to the issues was that I think the earning points on rent and housing payments wasn't how it would work, wasn't really, communicated very well at the get-go, and they got some bad press about that. And so it looked like you had to kind of pay to earn points for your housing payments. And so they immediately made a change where you could opt to earn the 4% built cash and then exchange some of that, basically, to be able to earn points for housing payments. Or you could forego built cash at all and just automatically earn points for housing payments under a very complicated scheme. And to me, that was a really huge blunder

because it just made talking about built and how it works. It went from, it was complicated, but you could get past it to, I can't even, like, I don't want to spend the time talking about all these options and why you might want to do this or that. Or, you know, it's just too complicated by having that new option.

So I think that was a big blunder. Probably worst of all, though, was the fact that people were trying to make housing payments through bill, and it was failing. Sometimes their money was just going into the ether and not ending up where it was supposed to end up. And so that was obviously a huge, huge problem. Yeah. And obviously it wasn't everybody, but it shouldn't have been anybody. And for the people that did have that issue, I can't imagine how frustrated. that was. So, because we did receive those types of reports in the beginning where people's payments

weren't delivered and the money was taken out of their account. And my goodness, how upsetting that would be. And, you know, what would that do to your trust in the program? I mean, obviously, I would tank my trust in the program if it happened one time to anybody I know, right? So I can totally see where a lot of people had a pretty negative viewpoint early on. And Stephen was looking right that they just weren't prepared to deliver. And I think that really, that's what it comes down to. I think it was a lack of preparation to be ready for. Yeah.

Yeah. I suspect that, you know, they had to transition card issuers. They had a hard deadline on that and they just weren't ready. That, you know, for whatever reason, they had these great big plans and they weren't, They were too big for the amount of time they had to pull it all off. But whatever the reasons are behind it, it was extremely messy. Despite all that, three out of, so Nick and I, well, I'll let you, Nick explain that. It was actually your wife.

But still, we and Tim did get the Palladium card. And we've been using it since we've gotten it. And so, you know, we're going to talk in a little bit about our experiences so far. I don't think either of us have used them for housing payments yet. And when we give our individual reviews, we can talk more about that. Why not? Now, my observation, and this is, there's no real data behind this, is that complaints about Bill 2.0 have slowed down considerably. Like, in the first couple months, we were getting emails, messages on different social media platforms all the time about, like, all these awful things that were happening.

it's not that we're not getting any anymore, but it's slowed way down and seems to me similar to what we get people complaining about Chase or other issuers. Also, I've seen in a couple Facebook groups, including our own frequentiler insiders, people asking the group, what do you think about built now? And it seems like the majority of the people say, no problems. And so, of course, there's some people that say, I have this and that problem. So I don't want to make light of those,

but it's still the majority seem to have no problem. Yeah. And I think that that's probably the best point to make, that obviously there are still, well, as you said, we weekly receive notes, emails, messages, and social media, whatever about things gone wrong with everybody. Like every issuer, every loyalty program, like probably not a week goes by that we don't get a message from somebody saying,

warn all your readers about this program because this happened to me. And that really stinks, you know, whatever the situation, they're more than once. I've been like, wow, that's horrible in that situation. But it's not necessarily widespread. It's not the average experience that somebody's going to have in that situation. And I think it's slowed to more of that type of thing with built. It seems that there are some of those where I'm like, oh, wow, that shouldn't be the case. But it's not, it's not the norm that people are having problems with.

It's more the norm that people are, are, are, are, are, better shape with it these days. So that's good. That's certainly an improvement. I mean, there's probably still some room to improve, but that's certainly an improvement. And like you said, three out of four of us have one of these cards in our household. So I mean, that says something, I think, about how we feel about using them. But we'll talk more about how we feel about it. Let's, let's go over the card details. I think, well, I know in our household, we got a palladium. You have a palladium. I think that's what Tim has too. We're all in the palladium. So, so let's talk about the pladium card. So the pladium card has a $495 annual fee. It earns two points per dollar plus

four percent in built cash on your everyday purchases. So that 4% as we will talk about is not 4% cash back. It's 4% built cash. So think of it as monopoly money that has very restrictive purposes. And we'll talk more about what those are. Also keep in mind, but we're not going to talk details about it that you can opt not to get built cash in order to earn. points on housing payments. I think Tim is playing around with with that. There are tricks for turning that off and on to to sort of maximize your earnings. I don't think Nick and I are doing that at all. No, no, we're not. So, so the earning rate again, the 2x, but, but, but, but, key, but here is you can't earn any points on tax payments. And that's a huge bummer because this would certainly be a great

card for paying your taxes, but you won't earn any points at all. So it's a terrible card for paying your taxes as it turns up. Yeah. Perks of the card, you get $200 in built cash annually. So that's an annual benefit. There is built cash that's part of the welcome bonus also I'll mention. But this 200 you get every year. And you get up to $400 in built travel hotel credits.

That's $200 January to June, $200, July to December. That has to be used on a two-night minimum stay. And you can add up to $100 in built cash on top if you have gold or platinum status. which if you get the platoidium card and you meet the welcome bonus, then you'll have built gold status. So you could use $100 on top. Otherwise, you can only use $50. And using that built cash towards a hotel stay always has to be a minimum of two nights also. So you do have that restriction.

And then priority pass. Card comes with priority pass. No restaurant access, but you do get access to priority pass lounges. Welcome bonus is okay. It's not bad. You get 50,000 built points plus gold elite status after 4,000. in non-housing spend in the first three months and $300 built cash right away when you apply and are approved.

That's super useful because we'll talk about uses of built cash. You can put some built cash to use right away to, for example, accelerate the earnings on the card. So that makes it pretty useful. Right, right. All right. Now to understand the built platform, a big piece of it, you have to understand that built has elite status.

And it's kind of important to understand. transfer bonuses and and other things. So we're going to talk very briefly about elite status. One of the benefits of any level of elite status is it unlocks ability to redeem Racketon shopping rewards at one-to-one. So basically every penny you earn from Rackettin shopping portal can become one built point. So that's a good benefit of any level of elite status. Not going to talk about the benefits of each level beyond that right here.

although it'll come up when we're talking about built cash and other stuff. All right. So you can earn built elite status in two ways. One is based on how many built points you earn in a year. The other is by how much spend you do on the credit card and with built neighborhood. What are they called? Built merchants, neighborhood reward. Something or other.

Neighborhood stuff. Build partners. So if you do it by earning points, earning 50,000 points gives you, silver, you need $125,000 earn gold and $200,000 to earn platinum. With spend, though, you can get silver with just $10,000 spend, gold with $25,000, and platinum with $50,000. So those are, the latter is the way I've earned status even before built 2.0. All right. Now let's talk about built cash and what what it can be used for. First, at a high level, it's good to know that almost all your built cash will expire at the end of the year. So December 31st, last day to use your built cash.

$100, up to $100 will roll over to the next year. But tell us about some of the good ways we can use built cash. Let's not go over every single thing, but just what are some of the good ways? Right. Well, I mean, I think that the key way that we're using it, well, so if you want to unlock points on housing payments. Every $30 in built cash redeemed can be unlocked for a thousand points on your monthly rent or mortgage payments. So that could work out to be a good deal. If you're, you know, depending on your spend level and your mortgage or rent cost, that can be a good deal. Or I think the way that Greg and I are using it is it can be used for points accelerators on everyday spend. Now, you have to have either the palladium or the obsidian card in order to

to be able to do this. If you have the built blue card, you can't. But if you have the Palladium or obsidian, then you can use $200 in built cash to earn an additional one point per dollar on all of your spend, up to $5,000 spend or the end of the calendar year. And you can repeat that and do up to five of those activations per year. And because you earn 4% back in built cash after every $5,000 you've spent, you'll have another $200 in built cash that you can use to enable the next accelerator. Yeah. Yeah. So before we go into the next uses, I just want to point out real quickly that if you max this out every year, then you're, meaning you spend $25,000 every year on these accelerators, you get a total of 3x rewards for all that spend. Plus, you'll have gold status.

You'll keep gold status beyond the gold status you get from the welcome bonus. So that's a pretty sweet combination right there. And you'll end up with some additional built cash, even if you're using your built cash each time, because you also earn an additional $50 in built cash for every $25,000 points earned. So if you earn 75,000 points on 25,000 spend, you'd also have $150 in built cash at the end of those five accelerators as well. So that's that. Let's see. The other uses of built cash, the other key one that you and I would consider, and maybe you've used once already, is to unlock a higher transfer bonus.

So the price for that is not fixed, but built usually allows you to buy up to the next level transfer bonus. So you can essentially buy an additional like 25% or whatever the difference is. If you've got built gold status, you could buy your way up to whatever the built platinum transfer bonus is. Usually so far it's been $125 to $150 worth of built cash in order to buy up to that. And that actually can be a really good deal in terms of your return, you know, the number of points you get for the amount of build cash, right? Yeah. You know, so they've been limiting transfer bonuses to, you know,

maximum 100,000 built points that you could transfer. But if you think of it as getting 25% more than I think you're, you're buying, you know, uh, 20, around 25,000 miles, let's say if it's, if, if it's a mileage deal for, um, for what half, uh, or around, half a built cash cent per mile. I mean, since this is funny money anyway, I mean, I think that's an amazing deal. Yeah. Agreed.

Agreed. Very good deal. Unless it's a transfer bonus to Hilton, in which case you should bother. You can also use your built cash for hotel stays. You can use up to $100 a month as a gold or platinum member, $50 a month otherwise, to book a hotel stay through built hotel booking platform, the travel rewards in the in the app. But of course, it does have a two-night minimum stay.

So you do need to watch out for that. Then there's a bunch of other piddly stuff. Yeah, you know, you could get $10 a month towards Grub or Lyft or Walgreens. There's also stuff that's like hard to find unless you're in New York City or maybe a few other major cities, stuff like being able spend up to $25 per month for built's mobile dining checkout or up to $50 per month. month towards built dining experiences or towards built's comedy experiences. Those would all be fine ways of using built cash if you have access to those things.

I just haven't in my travels like run into a situation where I could use those. Someday they've been promising soon to allow up to $350 to be spent on Blade helicopter rides and up to $150 for elite members to book Blacklean. You know, so when those happen, those could be useful in some circumstances. Yeah, you know, I have felt the same way about those things as Greg. Though I will say I was having a conversation with Justin from the hurdy-gurdy travel podcast the other day. And he's very much into the casino stuff. And we were talking about some casino stuff because I'm going to Las Vegas soon.

And he gave me the tip about a restaurant in Las Vegas that's on the built mobile dining checkout. Oh, nice. restaurant that actually looks excellent. I'm pumped. I'm excited to use the built cash because we're going to end up with a bunch of extra built cash at the end of the year that is probably some of it's going to expire. We'll talk more about that in a few minutes. So I definitely am looking for some opportunities like that to use it.

I was like, oh, that's terrific because I'll be excited to eat there. And I'll keep my eye on the built dining experiences because I'm going to be there early in a month. Yeah. No, you totally should. I'm wondering if you and your wife both have built cash, if there's a way to split the check and both use $25. That's a great question for the build mobile dining checkout.

Looking forward to you to report on that. We will report back on that. I'll definitely try that out. All right. So that's all that. So let's talk about like what we actually think. What's our review of this so far? Both of us have been into this for a while.

So I'll talk about my situation first, I guess. My wife has the palladium card. Actually, I have tried to get the palladium card. I can't seem to get approved. I don't actually have a mortgage or housing payment. And so they've, in the denials, said that the lack of a mortgage is a problem for them. Oh, wow. Okay.

I don't know. I don't know why that is because my wife doesn't have one either. And she got approved. Right. But, but. She just looks more trustworthy than you. Right. It's just a fact.

Right. So, so anyway, she's got the Palladium card. And so she added me as an authorized user. And I recently wrote a post that public. just this week actually about my experiences with that so far. I've only been an authorized user for about a month, but it's kind of interesting because the primary card holder can decide which person earns points in built cash on purchases made on the authorized user card. So on my card, either the points in the built cash can go to my wife's account or they can go to my account.

Now, we decided to send them to my account so that I could earn built elite status because I earn racketon points sometimes through referrals from readers signing up and podcast listeners signing up for rackettin and then I shopped through racketing now and then too and so I get racketing points and I want the one-to-one transfer so I want elite status so she added me as an authorized user and I started spending on the card I found that even though she had an accelerator enabled on her card that did not carry over to the authorized user card the authorized user has to enable their own accelerators. So even though her purchases were earning three points per dollar, mine were only earning two points per dollar until I had earned $200 worth of built cash and I could enable the

accelerator. Now I did do that and that taught me that the authorized user also gets their own five accelerators each year. So if you're a really big spender, both of you can have up to five accelerators. And if we ultimately just wanted my wife to have built status and my wife to have all the built points. Like, I think most households, the player one is probably the primary cardholder. We're just in the unfortunate circumstances where player two is the primary cardholder. But if we wanted that, that would be really pretty interesting because then she could be earning all the points and all the status in her account. And we could enable five accelerators each. So, I mean, we'd be earning a lot of points on that, too. So I think that's useful.

That's surprisingly useful. We're using it kind of in a backwards way. but so be it. I did enable an accelerator, and I made sure that my authorized user card is now the primary payment method, both in my Google pay and my wife's Google pay. So when we're tapping to pay, when we're out and about, even the purchases she's making are ultimately going, you know,

into my built account and earning the built cash on those to be able to experiment with stuff like the restaurant in Las Vegas and splitting the check, which was a great tip there. So we've been using it basically as our everywhere else card. and we're earning a bunch of points. And we've earned a lot of built cash in my wife's account more than we're probably ultimately going to need back to that in the second. But I was initially using it for the accelerators.

But right now, she probably just ran out of an accelerator. And I haven't enabled another one since we're making all the purchases now in my account on the authorized user card. So she's got some languishing built cash. That's going to be a problem at the end of the year. But we're working at it anyway. I still have four more accelerators on my authorized user card. She's got a couple on the primary cards.

So we will continue to enable those as we see fit. Every rent day, I'm using it to pay an insurance bill on the first of the month. And I've been impressed that spending more than the $500 does not trip up the earnings on that. And what I mean by that is built accurately calculates how many points should be doubled for rent day, because you earn four points per dollar essentially on $500 worth of spend on rent day with this card. And it splits it out. So if I make a payment of, let's say, $1,000, it splits out the points for that 500 and then the points, ordinary points earned on the other 500. So I've been happy that that works automatically, that it works correctly because I thought, oh, this is going to mess something up.

It's not going to work the way I expected to. Do I need to split up my payment and make it over two separate payments on two separate days, but nope, everything is calculated well there so far. So that's been good news for me. We have not found a use for the $200 built hotel credit. And that's been really frustrating. I did book something that I ended up canceling because I just decided to stay two different hotels in two different cities instead of staying in one city for two nights. So I have not yet found a good use of that credit. And it's been really frustrating. And there's been a number of reasons. Number one, I just don't end up having that many two-night hotel stays. Number two, when I do, they're usually in cities that are expensive enough that I'd rather not be paying the

cash rate. So I'd rather be using points or free night certificates. Number three, if I am paying the cash rate, then I have all sorts of hotel credits that I'm swimming in between FHR credits and the Strata Elite credit and the Hilton credits on the business platinum cards and everything else. So I haven't found that terribly useful. However, I imagine a lot of people do find it useful. Like, it's I'm just in the situation where I don't have a lot of those days to book. So I've not used that at all, but I'm hopeful that we'll be able to make use of Black Lane if they ever enable that. And I'm hopeful that we'll be able to use some of our built cash for Black Lane because

the big problem now is that my wife's got about $600 in build cash in her account. And if I don't use it, I mean, maybe I'll get lucky and use a couple hundred of it with hotel bookings over the course of the rest of the year. but I don't see that as very likely. So I really need to focus in now. I think I'm making use of some of the pittly stuff because I haven't been bothering at all with like the Grubhub or Lyft or Walgreens,

but I see that I'm going to end up losing more value than I'd like by the end of the year in the built cash. And I say more value than I'd like. Really, I'm looking at the built cash as gravy because I'm pretty happy to be earning three built points per dollars spent on my purchases. So like you said kind of at the beginning, if I get anything out of that additional 4%, it's just kind of a win. So if we enjoy a nice meal in Las Vegas and I'm able to use any of the rest of it, I'll be pretty happy.

Now, big question for me, am I using it for housing payments? No, I'm not using it for housing payments. And that's why, because I don't have a housing payment to make. But the second piece that I think a lot of people probably would ask about is, am I earning my built points and burning them? because I obviously just said when we're earning a fair number of them. Am I earning them and bringing them right away? Or am I concerned that built points are going to evaporate? Am I willing to continue earning a lot of them and store them up and wait to use them,

or am I prioritizing using them first? And I said a number of times over the first half of this year that I would probably prioritize using rewards from programs that are less established, like Built and Rove. They're newer comers to the hobby. And so I had talked about prioritizing the use of those points ahead of points that are more established like AMX membership rewards points or Chase Ultimate Rewards points or what have you. In reality, I haven't really done that. I've ended up hanging on to my built points for the most part. Now, I have recently burned through most of our Chase Ultimate Rewards points.

So now I'm looking at my built points as my Hyatt stash or transfer bonus stash. And so those are the two purposes I'm looking. at it for. I haven't been prioritizing, transferring it to other partners when I want to make award bookings. I've recently transferred points from Capital One and Amex to partners that I could have transferred from Built for. But I didn't because I'm hanging on to my built points for those other uses. And I'm really hopeful crossing my fingers that we will see a good transfer bonus to something much better than Hilton before the end of this year. Because I'd like to use some of the built cash and transfer over. Like if we get a transfer bonus to have,

Bianca Life Miles or Canada Airplane or Alaska. I know that's kind of wishful thinking or Air France even or Virgin Atlantic. I would probably max that out. Now, we've usually said we wouldn't speculatively transfer points, but I think I might make an exception for one of these, especially now that they're capped. So it's not like I would consider using all of our billpoints. I won't have to worry about that because I'll be capped at only transferring up to 100,000. So I'm pretty bullish on built at this point, I think. It's been working out in our household so far. What about you?

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I've been using the palladium card as my everywhere else card lately. And by that, I mean, when I'm not earning 3x or more with some other card, I use the built palladium. And I think you can make a good argument that why not use it even when other things are 3x? because it averages somewhere in that neighborhood. But I have my reason. So one example, just to talk about one,

is my Atma Summit card. I'm using it for 3X dining right now because I'm getting close to enough spend to get that 100K award discount thing. So, you know, that's why. But if it wasn't for that, I probably would just, you know, use the plate-in.

Even though I'm not averaging 3x because my goal has been, and I just achieved it just yesterday, actually, as we're recording this, my goal has been to earn platinum status with $50,000 spend. And because that was my goal and because I'm not using it for housing payments of any kind, and I'll talk more about that in a second, I had to do a lot of the spend at two-hour. instead of 3x. Remember, the accelerator tops out at $25,000 of spend. I have been maxing out my rent day. Every rent day, I make sure to spend $500 on the card, so I get $4X for that amount of spend. But still, that plus the $25,000 that's been accelerated doesn't get me to the $50,000 needed for platinum status. so I have been earning at 2x past those things. Oh, let me hop in with two, so you mentioned the built rent day, and I mentioned that too, but one thing that somebody asked about, but I don't know the answer to yet, and I will hopefully

know after July 1st is, does both the authorized user and the primary card holder get the double rewards on rente? So in other words, if I have a $1,000 bill to pay, can I pay $500 on my wife's card and $500 on my card and both earn double points, I would assume properly. So I assume so too. So I intend to do that. Also, when you mentioned using this like everywhere, even when you could otherwise earn three points per dollar, something that came to my mind is this has become the ultimate

player two card. Like I, my wife uses this and only this. And I say, just use this for everything. I don't care if it's dining or grocery or whatever. It's going to be three points per dollar. So go ahead and just use the bell palladium. And it's nice for that. It's really nice for that.

Yes. Yes. Yes, that makes tons of sense. Okay, so, yeah, so I've been earning tons of points, obviously, in working my way to platinum status. Tons of points. Tons of points have come over from Racketon, the shopping portal at one-to-one. So that's been really good. I did not until just a few weeks ago finally use my first six-month's hotel credit with the Palladium card.

But I was thinking that it was very likely to go unused because each time I've looked up to see, you know, oh, maybe I should book this coming stay through built. The prices were so much worse through built than wherever else I was looking that it just didn't make sense. You're not saving money if you're paying $300 more to save $200. Right, right. So it hasn't worked out, but then finally one stay came up. It was in Canada. And I'm just mentioning that because maybe the price increase over other places is limited to the U.S. or something. I don't know. But it was one place that's not a chain hotel. The built price was as good if not better than anywhere else I saw. And so I was able to use the $200 credit plus $100 built. towards that. So I was very happy to get, you know, real value from that. So that's, that's

exciting. And we'll see whether I get any value from the second half the year, hotel credit as well, to be determined on that. How I'm using built cash, as we've already mentioned, for the accelerators. That's been my number one use now. I've used some for a hotel booking. I do occasionally get that $10 Walgreens coupon, basically, because I have several Walgreens near me. And I plan to use them for transfer bonuses. So now that I have platinum status, the regular transfer bonus, and what I mean by that is not the ones that go to, like, Hilton, but the ones that go to, like, airline miles, the typical approach there with Built has been. been that, you know, platinum status gets you a 75% transfer bonus and you can add like $125 to $150 built cash to turn that into 100% transfer bonus. Sometimes it's even up from there.

Sometimes in the past you've seen 100% transfer bonus with platinum status and maybe 125% with this. Anyway, the point is that I could use built cash to increase the transfer bonus by 25%. on top of whatever I get automatically by having platinum status. So maximizing my transfer bonus, I think that's probably the single best use of built cash when the transfer target, whoever you're transferring to, is a valuable program. And so we just have to wait and see what that is. But because built has been limiting those transfer bonuses to 100,000 built points, and I'm earning much more than 100,000 points per year now, I, you know, I'm inclined to just be like to prospectively transfer if it's a good one, right?

So if I might look at and say, oh, it's to aviose, I'm not sure I have an immediate need for that, but that's such a good deal. It's kind of like buying aviose for, you know, a fraction of a cent each, if you think of it that way. but so it's it's such a good deal that it's I think it'll be worth doing and it'll be a way for me to use some of my built cash effectively. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting now I think about it because I say, okay, so if you if you're doing your spend at three X, not like Greg necessarily, but you're doing it at three X on average, then what, 33,33, $33,000 gets you about the 100,000 points that you could transfer. And if you got an additional 25% bump by buying, buying up to the next level, you get an additional 25,000 points.

That's almost an additional built point for every dollar that you've spent, right? I mean, it's like based on having spent the 33, 33, 333, if you end up getting the additional 25,000 points, it's essentially like almost getting Forex on that spend. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought about it that way. But there's no question in my mind that using the built cash, which is otherwise so close to worthless, that, you know, for getting more miles from a transfer bonus is great deal.

So, of course, the transfer bonus has to be a tour program that you care about. For sure. For sure. Also, ideally not one where the points expire if they don't get used. So it'll be challenging for me if this happens with Japan Airlines again because they have that hard expire rate three years. At the same time, they're really valuable points. So that'll be a tough one. So we'll see.

It's not that everything is perfect. I'm really disappointed that tax payments don't count. I could so easily, you know, spend a lot more with the card if they did. I could use a higher credit limit. The limit I got with my Play-Im card was less than my built 1.0 cards limit, and that hasn't been adjusted. A few weeks back, a whole bunch of people automatically had their limit raised to 50,000. That did not happen to me.

So, you know, every now and then, we have some really big, you know, spend to do, and I can't do it all at once on the built card, which is too bad. That's so weird. I think, yeah, you've been in that situation because they did. It did seem like they raised the credit limit a lot. But my wife's credit limit on this from opening went from like, I don't know, 18 or 19,000 under built 1.0 to 26 and change under 2.0. And now she got bumped up to the 50 along with lots of other people recently.

I'm surprised that you used it. Yeah, that's great. That's great for her. And for you. The other issue is around housing payments. Like I could earn a lot more points if I made housing payments through built. I don't have housing payments on my own, but my mom has super high rent through her independent living facility. And she would happily let me, you know, make the payments on her behalf and pay me for it.

But, you know, if it was my own housing payment, I would do that in a second. Doing that for someone else where if anything goes wrong, I can't actually, like, I don't know that I could be the one calling and fixing it if something goes wrong or even noticing that anything goes wrong. It'll be through her bill. Anyway, so I've been very, very hesitant to do that. but I am trying to think now whether is there a situation where it would make sense for me to add my mom as an authorized user for my built card and have her make the payments because her rent is actually goes through a built building. So, you know, it's all she has to go through a built portal anyway to make the payments. Yeah, that is really interesting. And I think that's such a good point because when they first announced the ability to pay mortgage for other people, I had the same thought that, oh,

well, you know, I could pay some family members' mortgage and they could pay me back and maybe that'd be great. But early on, we had lots of reports of payments not going through or not reaching the, you know, the destination, et cetera. I thought, oh, my goodness, what a nightmare that would be because I'm not logging into their account. I wouldn't even know until they find out that their lender didn't get the payment, right? Or I'd have to remind them, hey, log in and make sure that they got the payment and that just seems not smooth to me. So I've been very hesitant to consider using it for anybody else's housing payment. But that's, I think, really interesting, the idea of doing it as an authorized user so that hopefully you would see at least that that payment

has been taken out and have at least half of piece of mind on that. Yeah. All right. So final word on this. Obviously, Nick and I are doing really well with our built cards. A lot of people, though, have sworn off Bill, because they don't trust the company. They fear it might go bankrupt, or they just literally believe that Built doesn't have our best interests at heart. And so can't be trusted with your points and that kind of thing. And those are all legitimate concerns that I don't want to downplay. I just say that Nick and I feel comfortable that the points are valuable now and are very, very likely to continue to. to remain valuable. And so we don't mind kind of banking our points with built. But if that's

not you, that's fine. That's totally cool. Don't don't. You're not wrong. Don't feel like, oh, you're missing out because Nick and Greg said this and that. I mean, Stephen's not doing this at all. And he's totally fine. There are plenty of other good opportunities out there. If you don't go the built route, I just can't, I can't say this enough that I know that. I know that there's a tendency to hear about things when people kind of speak glowingly about them. Again, it's not what we're speaking glowingly about built the company. We're speaking glowingly about is the Palladium card, and specifically in our experience with it and earning lots of rewards with it.

And if you have doubts about it and so you don't feel good about that, just don't do it. That's totally legitimate. Or it might even be a smaller thing. might be like a $495 card, that's of no interest to me, right? And that's totally legitimate as well. Yeah, not a small thing at all there. That's a pretty big detail, actually, for, I think, for a lot of people. And totally legit.

And I think that that perspective carries over into so many pieces of this hobby, because I think it is very easy to either get wrapped up in somebody talking positively about something and think, oh, I should be doing that too. or if you're doing something to think everybody should be doing it the same way. And that's just not true that there are lots of different ways to participate in this hobby. And Greg's point about trusting what feels right for you is so important. I think Greg and I both sit in the situation that we're pretty confident in our built points, but also that if Bill disappeared tomorrow and we lost all of our points,

we'd be super disappointed, but we wouldn't probably be losing sleep over it either. It wouldn't bother us to that extent. But if I was someone who that would make me lose sleep or I'd be super upset about what I had missed out on, then I could totally see where I would just be like, you know, it's not worth the risk to me that something could go wrong. And that's fine. Different strokes or different folks. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder.

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