The new Bilt cards have finally been unveiled, and while there are a lot of details, I’m going to focus on the mortgage piece.
There are three versions of the card and they all have the capability of earning points for paying your mortgage each month.
However, to actually earn points for those mortgage payments, you need to generate significant non-mortgage spend each month to offset transaction fees.
Simply put, there is a 3% fee to pay the mortgage with a Bilt credit card and it must be recouped via non-mortgage spending.
The good news is each card earns 4% Bilt Cash on everyday spend, so for every $750 you spend, you get $1,000 in fee-free mortgage payments.
How the Bilt Cards Work for Mortgage Payments
As noted, Bilt charges a 3% transaction fee if you choose to pay the mortgage with any of their three new cards.
This applies to the Bilt Blue Card (no annual fee), Bilt Obsidian Card ($95 annual fee), and Bilt Palladium Card ($495 annual fee).
So for every $1,000 in mortgage payment, you would pay $30.
However, to offset this fee, you can apply Bilt Cash while earning Bilt Points for the transactions.
Stay with here, I know it’s confusing. The Bilt Cash has the same 4X earnings rate across all three card versions.
So for every $750 you spend each month (non-mortgage), you earn $30 in Bilt Cash.
That would give you enough Bilt Cash to offset $1,000 worth of a monthly mortgage payment.
You would then earn 1,000 Bilt Points (not Cash) for that transaction.
Those Bilt Points are valuable because they can be transferred to airline and loyalty partners and maximized for much more than a penny apiece.
But most people have much more expensive mortgages, especially these days.
Bilt Mortgage Payment Example
Suppose your monthly mortgage payment is $3,000. You would need $90 in Bilt Cash to offset the 3% fee of $90. You’d need to do this monthly.
In this scenario, you would need to spend $2,250 in non-mortgage spend each month to generate $90 in Bilt Cash.
You could then apply that $90 to offset the 3% transaction fee, which would be $90 for a $3,000 mortgage payment.
That makes you all square and you’d earn 1 Bilt Point per dollar of your mortgage, or 3,000 Bilt points in this example.
If you did this for 12 months, you’d earn 36,000 points simply for paying the mortgage with Bilt.
But again, you’d need to consistently spend $2,250 or more each month to generate the Bilt Cash necessary to offset the transaction fee.
In other words, they want you to actually use the card each month, not just open a Bilt credit card and charge the mortgage and nothing else.
There Is an Alternative If You Don’t Have Enough Bilt Cash
Now let’s suppose you don’t spend the required $2,250 per month on your Bilt card, using the same $3,000 mortgage payment example.
There’s still the option to pay the mortgage through the Bilt app or website.
However, you must pay the 3% transaction fee to still earn one point per $1 of your mortgage payment. So you’d need to spend $90 to earn 3,000 Bilt Points.
It’s also possible to pay a portion of the transaction fee if you didn’t spend enough in a given month.
For example, if you earned $60 in Bilt Cash you’d only have to pay $30 in transaction fees and you’d still earn the 3,000 Bilt Points as usual.
Or you can earn points on the portion of the mortgage payment that you allocate Bilt Cash towards.
So if you only have $60 in Bilt Cash and a $3,000 mortgage payment, you could still earn 2,000 Bilt Points and avoid the transaction fee.
You wouldn’t be charged that $30 remainder, but you also wouldn’t earn the 1,000 points for the portion not covered with Bilt Cash.
In other words, there are lots of options here even if you don’t spend enough each month to offset the entire fee.
You Can Earn Bilt Points on Multiple Mortgages
Even better, you can earn Bilt Points from multiple mortgages if you happen to own several properties.
And there’s no annual housing points cap if you own a ton of expensive properties.
For example, if you own five properties with mortgages, you could earn points on all of them, assuming you have the necessary Bilt Cash or choose to pay the transaction fee.
And you pay the mortgage without using your available credit line, so there’s still room to use the card and earn Bilt Cash as needed.
But you still have to do quite a bit of spending to offset fees each month and earn points.
For some real estate investors with multiple properties and lots of non-mortgage spend, this will be a very solid option to earn a lot of Bilt Points.
Are Mortgage Payments Actually Made with the Bilt Card?
Nope. Like Mesa, which has since shut down for not being profitable, you have to link an associated bank account in order to actually make mortgage payments.
Then once you make the payment through the Bilt app/website, the funds will be transferred from your bank account to the loan servicer.
In other words, you still pay the mortgage the traditional way since mortgage loan servicers don’t accept credit cards.
It’s just that you get to earn points for these payments, so long as you use Bilt Cash to offset the fee or simply pay the transaction fee.
This means it’s basically not beneficial to do this UNLESS you actually earn Bilt Points in the process.
There’s no upside here other than earning points. You can’t charge the mortgage to your credit card or give yourself an added grace period.
The fact that Bilt has to do all this to pay your mortgage explains why they have to charge the 3% fee as well.
TLDR: Make sure you’ll spend enough in non-mortgage spending each month so you can actually earn points for paying the mortgage. Otherwise it’s not worth it.
Before creating this site, I worked as an account executive for a wholesale mortgage lender in Los Angeles. My hands-on experience in the early 2000s inspired me to begin writing about mortgages 19 years ago to help prospective (and existing) home buyers better navigate the home loan process. Follow me on X for hot takes.
