Frequent Miler on the Air - Is the Bilt Palladium card worth its $495 annual fee? | Coffee Break Ep105 | 5-12-26

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

With most ultra-premium cards it's possible to simply add up how much you value each perk and see if it meets or exceeds the annual fee, but this card is mostly valuable for its high earning rate from spend... It's definitely worth $495 in the first year due to the welcome bonus, but what about after that?(01:38) - Palladium Card detailsLearn more about the Bilt Palladium card here(02:37) - Bilt Cash(06:03) - Is the Palladium card worth $495 in exchange for...(06:35) - Consider other cards(07:14) - Our takeVisit 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 – 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 NetworkVisit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break is the built palladium card worth its $495 annual fee. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. And as we start this coffee break, I actually have no idea. what we're going to answer in the end of this show. So I'm going to be as interested as anybody else in how this particular episode ends up. You know, with most expensive credit cards,

you can kind of figure out whether the card's right for you based on by looking at the card's perks and seeing whether you basically value, would you be willing to pay that big annual fee to get the collection of perks and coupons and things that the card offers? The Plainium card, though, I think is different because its biggest selling point is not really about its perks. It has a few, but it's really about the ability to earn built points, which are super valuable and at a very high multiple. And so, you know, it just works differently than most high-end credit cards and how you can figure out whether it's worth that annual fee. Yeah, and I'm just as interested in what we determine as you are because I haven't yet put a lot of thought into this, but it is really unique.

that the value of this card really is tied up in how many points you're going to earn, and not necessarily only points that you'll earn from spending on the card. And we'll talk about that a little bit later, too, because I think that really is going to come into play for at least a segment of people, if not a large segment of people. But let's start out by talking about the Palladium card details. So Greg mentioned it has a $495 annual fee, so kind of a steep fee. But you earn 2X on almost all spend.

It doesn't earn rewards on tax payments is one thing that's worth highlighting, but 2x on most purchases anyway, and 4% in built cash back. So you get both. You get two points per dollar plus 4% in built cash. The perks, like Greg mentioned, kind of light. It offers priority pass, which is nice to have, if you don't have another card that already offers that. And up to $400 in built travel hotel credits.

You get $200 every six months, but you do need to use those for a minimum two-night stay. So you get $200 off of a two-night or more stay twice a year, once between January and June and once between July and December. You also get $200 a year in built cash, which can be used in a number of different ways. So what can we use our built cash for? Yeah, I mean, you can use your built cash. Probably the most valuable way to use built cash for most people is to redeem for extra points. And there's multiple ways to do that. For example, you can use $200 in built cash to

start your point accelerator, and then you'll earn an extra point per dollar on up to $5,000 of spend, and you could do that five times per year. So, you know, just right there, the card becomes a 3x Everywhere card if you keep doing that. And it's convenient that every $5,000 of spend you earn $200 in built cash. So you could keep doing this. You can start with a $200 built cash that the card gives you each year automatically and then keep doing the point accelerator

five times a year if you want to to average exactly three points per dollar. But it gets better than that. If you have housing payments that you can make with built, then you'll actually earn more with your built cash than one extra point per dollar. And it varies how much you'll earn based on how much your housing payments are and how much you spend each month on the card.

So I'm not going to get into those details. But the point is you could do very well with that. And you can redeem built cash for enhanced transfer bonuses. Now, the amount of built cash you have to redeem varies based on the transfer bonus that happens. And normally, or at least in the few that we've seen since Bill cash was introduced, What we're seeing is you can redeem to get an extra 25% transfer bonus on top of whatever bonus you're otherwise allowed. But, you know, there's no guarantee that it'll be exactly that going forward. Nor is there a guarantee as to whether that'll be capped or not because the first few times I think it wasn't capped, but then the last time it was.

And so we don't exactly know what the limitations might be long term in that. Yeah. And there are also, I'm calling coupon uses for built cash. And that's where you can save a little bit of money on different things by applying built cash. You can do that. You can do $10 a month towards Lyft. And that does give you $10 off a Lyft rides. But because it's so limited, it kind of feels more like a coupon than a, you know, straight up dollar for dollar redemption.

You could do $10 a month with Lyft, Walgreens, Grubhub. These are just a few examples. you can do, if you have gold or higher elite status, you can do up to $100 per month towards hotels book through built. Otherwise, it's $50 per month. You could do up to $40 a month towards fitness classes. Eventually, they'll enable the $350, up to $350 towards a blade helicopter ride once every six months or something like that. So those are just some examples of what, of kind of coupon uses. You know, I think that in some, cases, people can do reasonably well with those coupons, but I think for the most part, when I think

about whether this card is worth it and how I would recommend using built cash, I would recommend focusing first on how can you earn extra points by redeeming your billed cash. And you really can earn a lot of points with this card. We'll be right back after this with more about that. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that frequent miler is a website? At Frequentmyler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back.

All right, Nick, let's discuss. Is the palladium card worth $495 an exchange? change for 2x or more on all spend, $400 per year in hotel credits, $200 per year in built cash, and priority pass. Yeah, I mean, it's not as easy to answer as it sounds on the surface. Because if we were just to say, okay, 2X everywhere in a transferable currency, we just kind of kept it generic like that, would it be worth $495 a year for that? Well, probably not, because you could just get a Capital One venture card and earn two transferable points per dollar spent with only a $95 annual fee, keep the other $400 in your pocket. Or if you want some

similar benefits, you go venture X card and get the same two X everywhere plus the priority pass, plus arguably a more useful travel credit, $300 travel credit a year, $10,000 points each anniversary. So if I were just looking for two points per dollar, I might go one of those or maybe a double cash and a strata premiere and have $95 in total annual fee outlay. and be earning two transferable points per dollar spent. There are a bunch of those examples, but that takes a couple of things out of consideration here. And the first thing it takes out of consideration is important to me,

and that's the value of the points, because built points have so many good uses. There are so many good transfer partners, and it's the combination, right? Some of those partners are available via Capital One. Some of them are available via cities. Some of them are available via Chase, but nobody else has all of them.

together the way that Bill does. And I say all of them. And there are partners that Bill doesn't have. There are a couple of gaps there. But they have some of the ones I want to use the most. And the ability to earn two points per dollar that could become two Alaska miles or could become two Hyatt points. For me, you know, those two redemptions alone could account for a large percentage of points that I would use every year and the flexibility to use either of those or when I want to use one of the other transfer partners that works out well, have that possibility too. That makes two points per dollar on the plodium card to me,

as things stand anyway, more valuable than two points per dollar on a venture X or two points per dollar on a double cash. Yeah, that's what makes this whole conversation so difficult, like to figure out whether it's worth that $4.95. There's so many factors like that. Now, you might think, well, what about the $400 per year in hotel credits?

doesn't that, you know, cover most of the annual fee? In fact, if you can apply $100 in built cash to each $200 hotel redemption, then you're basically saving $600 per year on hotels theoretically. And that's true-ish, but a few things to keep in mind that, you know, when you book hotels through build, at least in my experience, it's often overpriced. or the hotel I want isn't available through built. The, you know, it does have that requirement of a two-day stay. With most hotels book through built, you're not going to earn, you know, hotel points or elite credits unless it's the built home away collection, which is limited.

So there's all these reasons that, you know, at least for me, you know, I look at that the hotel credit and say, it'll be nice if I can use it. but I'm not going to, I don't see enough there. I haven't yet had an opportunity to use it to get any value out of it. So I'm not going to look at it as say personally and say, I'm getting $400 back or really anything. I'm going to see that as a bonus if I get some good use of it personally. I don't, Nick, do you see it that way too or do you have a different take on that? I do.

I think actually this could probably be appealing to a broader segment of people. I think you and I, the way we tend to travel with rewards and with the various cards we have, tends to not be very compatible with this. Like, I don't for me, when I'm saying two nights or more at a place, it's typically at a place I don't want to have to pay the cash rate at. So I'm using points to stay there. Or it's a place where I'm using like an FHR credit one night at a time for $300 off. Right.

It's not that common. I spend two nights at a place that's a cash rate I want to pay for those two nights. nights. And so for me, yes, I feel exactly the same as you do about it. I haven't used it yet. I don't know whether we'll use it. I'm not banking on even using it. However, I do see like, well, if I were going somewhere for a weekend for two nights and I didn't really care where I was staying because I'm going for a concert or a sporting event or whatever else. And the primary reason I'm going somewhere for the weekend has nothing to do with where I stay. Or again, it just doesn't matter where I stay, you know, if my kids were in traveling sports and I had to go somewhere for the weekend,

and I'm going to be all weekend long at a sports tournament and not like touring the city, well, then I'd probably be just as happy to use that on a, I don't know, Holiday Inn Express or Crown Plaza or someplace that maybe isn't, you know, the type of redemption I normally do, and that's not to say anything's wrong with those places. I tend to use those places for that type of scenario. And so I just don't have a lot of those trips right now. And if I did, then maybe I'd value it more. Right now I don't, so I'm not seeing a ton of value in it. Like you said, the times when I've looked, they typically don't have the best prices and there's oftentimes a better way to book the property. I'm also kind of in a situation where I keep earning

Capital One shopping rewards. And so one of the best redemptions there is Hotels.com gift cards. And so I'm often redeeming those and using those to pay for those days. Because I do have a few days this year of places that aren't chains. But again, I don't want to pay the cash rates. I just want to redeem capital one shopping rewards for hotels.com gift cards and use that to cover it and not pay anything out of pocket. Yeah. Yeah. I think where people can do especially well with this is if they're booking hotels that are cheaper. Like maybe they're in, you know, going to cheaper destinations or just don't mind that, you know, the cheapest hotels. And I'm saying that because, you know, let's say built tends to be 10% higher than in the cost for hotels than what you get elsewhere.

where if you're going to a $400 per night hotel and you have to spend two nights and, you know, then add on the taxes and fees and all that stuff, you're not really saving $200 by applying $200 of hotel credit, right? Yeah. But if it's a $100 a night hotel and it costs $110 with bill, then, you know, you're saving about $180 or whatever in that range, right? So you're getting to around 90% of the value of the credit if you go lower market. Exactly. That's exactly what I mean. And that's, and that's the situation where I would use this. If I'm looking at okay, I'm going to stay at a place that's about 150 bucks a

night, you know, then I might use the $200 plus the $100 in built cash. And maybe I'm not getting quite the best deal possible. Maybe I'm sacrificing some points, but it's probably a situation where where that would make sense. It'd be fine. I'd be saving a decent amount of money and saving enough money that I don't care whether I get free breakfast or not in that particular case. So, yeah, I think there are uses like that. I just haven't found a lot of them. And so I'm not tying much of the value of the card into that.

I could totally see where somebody else would be like, I'm staying in hotels three weekends a month for traveling volleyball or whatever it might be. And I know plenty of people that they're doing that type of thing. Or just that I'm going to Bali and hotels are all inexpensive. And so I'm going to use this to stay five nights somewhere because I can. And so I can see plenty of scenarios where it would make sense. It doesn't add much value for me. Yeah, there you go. So, you know, earlier on I said I think most people will get most value redeeming their

built cash for increased rewards, right? So, and as I said earlier, there's multiple ways to get more than 2x return on spend. But figuring out whether that is worth $4.95, it's like, I don't know how to do that. So what I did is I tried to come up with like one very specific use case example that we can kind of like use as a starting point. So let's say you don't have any housing payments to make with built. So what you're going to do is you're going to use your built cash to to redeem for points accelerator. So basically what you're doing is you're getting for every $5,000 spend, you're getting an extra point per dollar. up to $25,000 in spend per year by using your points accelerators one after another.

So let's just say you spend $25,000 per year that way. You know, what would you get? You would, after you're done with that $25,000 spend, you'd have an extra $25,000 built points. So in addition to the $50,000 that you get normally from $25,000 spend. You'd also have gold status by then, thanks to it gives you gold status after a certain amount of spend. And you'd have $200 built cash left over if you weren't earning built cash from other sources. I guess you'd earn a little bit more from every 25,000 points. Yeah, I was going to say every 25,000 points you're in another 50.

So you'd have another 150 at that point. That's right. Okay. So you'd actually have more than that. Yep. The gold status that you get from all that spend is going to unlock better transfer bonuses. and the extra built cash you got, you have at the end there, the $350 built cash or whatever it is, can be used to unlock even better transfer bonuses as well.

So you get the gold, having gold status gives you better transfer bonus, and then you can use your built cash to get even better transfer bonuses. So those are all good things, but is it worth it? Well, that's a really good question. So would you spend $500 a year, you know, the $495 annual fee for an extra $25,000 points? plus better transfer bonuses? What do you think? Yeah. All right. So if we just look at the extra built points, before we think about the transfer bonuses, $4.95 to get an extra $0,000 built points, that's like paying $0.2 per point for your

built points, which, I mean, you can make an argument for that being worth it, but that's a lot, right? I mean, that's more than I would normally pay for any points. Same. But if you think about the transfer bonuses, let's talk. about that. So with that $25,000 spend, you end up with 75,000 built points each year and gold status. And so if you use the combination of gold status plus redeeming built cash for better transfer bonuses, then let's say it continues the trend of each of those gives you basically 25% more transfer points than you would have with silver status and no build cash. Then if you take those

75,000 built points, transfer them during these transfer bonuses, you're basically getting 50% more of your resulting points, right? So that's, that's 37,500 extra points after transferring. So the $495 now is like paying $1.32 per extra point. Now, what is that extra point? It could be Air France Miles, it could be, you know, it could be whatever the transfer bonuses were for, and we have no way of predicting exactly what that is. Would you, I would, I would, wouldn't pay 1.32 for an unknown type of points. Yeah, I mean, I think paying 1.3.2 for any type of points is already marginal. You know, like, that's, that's already a price where I'm like, I might buy if I had a redemption that I needed to make, but I mean, there are times and points go

and sale for 1.4 or miles go on sale for 1.3 cents per mile. And I'm not usually buying even at that price. I don't think you are either. So paying 1.32 cents for miles, on Descript Miles, that we don't even know if they're going to offer a transfer bonus, if it'll be a program we want to use, if there'll be an award that we want to book, or if we're going to feel like, oh, I don't know, because I don't have a redemption right now and we hold out. And then the next transfer bonus is one we really don't like. You know, there's a, there's a lot of variables there. So no, I think 1.32 is too high as the short version of the story. If that's it, if that's the whole story for you, that you're just going to earn three points per dollar on $25,000 in purchases,

and hope for a good transfer bonus, then I think that's too much, too much to be paying, essentially. So I would say at that point, it's probably not worth it, unless you also value the hotel coupon and the priority pass and everything else. But again, if it's just for the points, no. It's a no from me, Doug. Yeah, I agree.

It's right around there. Now, you know, and to be clear, that's giving like zero value to things like the $10 a month, Grubhub and Walgreens and all that, which, you know, if you go, go to those, if you use those things regularly, those are going to add up to $120 each per year. So it could change the math substantially if you actually get good use out of those things. And let me back up and say that Greg and I are looking at this through the lens of we both earn a lot of points every year.

We open new cards and we earn new points that way. We use spend techniques to spend a lot and earn a lot of points. So we're not willing to pay 1.3.2 cents per point. But if you don't do that kind of thing, if you're somebody, somebody, who earns a much more limited number of points each year, then 1.32 cents might be a terrific price because it's not that you can't redeem your points for much more value.

You can. I'm just not willing to pay that much because I got a bunch of other points and I'm going to continue to earn a bunch of other points. But if I were going to earn one points currency and this was it every year, then 1.32 cents might seem a lot more reasonable to me. Actually, that's totally true.

And actually, things get much better than this hypothetical scenario. So if you do have housing payments to make, you can do much better than that three points per dollar for all your spend. And then the math, you know, starts to get more and more in your favor. Or consider also that there are other ways of earning built points. And so as you're earning more and more built points from other sources, the advantages you get from those transfer bonuses we talked about grow because you have more points available to potentially transfer and

get more value from those things. So things like RACC, shopping. If you use that rocket and shopping portal a lot, get a lot of points that way. And if you credit it to built, that's one way. Built neighborhood rewards. They have rewards for dining and for shopping at Walgreens and just all kinds of miscellaneous things, restaurants. And so, you know, those things can add up in the right situation. So in those cases, you know, suddenly the math will change to where it becomes much less than 1.32 cents you're talking about. it's probably valuable. And the irony is, you know, Nick and I were talking about how we're not in, we're in a

position where it doesn't make sense for us. But the reality is because of our job, we actually earn a lot of racketon referral credits. And those, if they turn into built points, then we will have a lot more built points available than what we've been talking about to make a, those transfer bonus is really valuable. Yeah, I mean, that really is what tips the scale for me because we aren't a decent chunk of Racketon points each year that way. And lots of people like the Racketon Shopping Portal.

And before Capital One Shopping, it was my preferred portal too. I typically use Racketon more than anything else because the tracking is the most reliable. And I think people across the board, I think that I say across the board, not every single person is going to grant anything. But I think if you took the temperature of the room, the vast majority of people that are hyped up on travel rewards and shopping portals

probably have the most faith in Racketon over other portals that will sometimes have issues with tracking. Now, I generally have success with almost all the portals, but Racketon is the one I think that is most consistent in terms of if you see the payout and you click through, you're probably going to get the points. Their system seems to work really well. So a lot of people like that. So a lot of people prefer Racketon over other options.

even when those other options pay out a little bit more. And so I think there are a lot of people that earn a decent chunk of Racketon points every year from shopping. And that was me before all of the crazy Capital One shopping targeted things. And I just keep getting so many of those that I tend to use Capital One shopping more often. But when it's close, like just the other day this happened to me. I was booking a hotel through Hotels.com and I went through Racketon because they had a better rate than Capital One shopping. And so it's not that I don't use them. I do use them some.

as much as I used to, but I earn enough from referrals and those times when I use them that I say, okay, well, now I've got a chunk of racketon points coming, you know, each quarter, and those could become really valuable built points. And whether I only transfer those to, you know, Alaska and Hyatt, or I transfer them during a transfer bonus to one of these programs with a really good transfer bonus, that can really amp up the value of those to me. And so now I need to have status with built. And the easiest way to get status for most people is going to be via the credit card. And so then it becomes, okay, well, the math is different now because now it's paying an amount to be able to earn status and earning the points and amping up the value of Racketon.

So for me, I think the palladium card is going to make sense long term. For other people, I think it's really hard to answer that question in any kind of blanket way. I think it's just too variable. And you could kind of cop out with that answer on almost any card on the market. But I think there's some that like the Venture X is pretty easy to recommend to a lot of people. Like a wide selection of people could do well with the Venture X. With the built card, you got to be willing to do the math, I think, to see, okay, does this make sense for me or not? What about you? Are you in the same boat? Yeah, no, exactly. You know, I think I'm earning enough points that it makes sense to pay that fee in order to get in on the, you know,

3X Everywhere action and the bigger transfer bonuses and all that stuff. And I agree with what you said. I'm not going to rehash all of that. Exactly what you said about how hard it is to give a blanket recommendation. I just, I just can't. Is it worth paying $4.95 for the Palladium card? I'm going to give that a big fat maybe. Oops, it looks like we went over the promised 20 minutes.

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