Bilt Palladium Card

The best part of this card is the offer includes lots of Bilt Cash upfront -- as an ongoing benefit, this card gives you $200 in Bilt cash each calendar year plus you get $300 from opening the card.

After you do the $4,000 required spending on this, you’d have another $160 Bilt cash. So that’s a total of $660 Bilt cash as soon as you have met your $4000 required spend.

That’s enough to earn 22,000 points on $22,000 of housing payments. But keep in mind that you’d need to make sure you were able to pay that much in housing payments by December 31, since Bilt cash mostly expires and only $100 can roll over.

That could give you a total of 80,000 points…but you paid $495 and had to jump through a bunch of hoops. So that’s just about average return, but for more effort than many cards.

With the welcome offer you do get Bilt Gold status right off the bat, which gives you a 1:1 ratio with Rakuten and possibly some transfer bonuses on Bilt day, which could be worth more to some people.

Priority Pass™ access at least includes 2 guests, but only for lounges.

I really can’t recommend booking travel with this card. It has the same $2,000 per trip limitation as the Obsidian card. And requires you to book the full ticket with this card to get coverage.

Other purchase protections are a mixed bag
The extended warranty will be better for some purchases and not others. That’s because it doubles a warranty period — up to 2 years. So for items with a 2 year warranty it gives you an extra 2 years. But for items with a shorter warranty, it only doubles it. So if you buy an item with a 30 day warranty, it only gives you 60 days total.

Because of that and because I like to keep it easy, I’m not sure I would default to making purchases on this card. I’d personally rather know I’m always getting a full year extension, since a lot of items have warranties of a year or less.

This does have one great benefit which is Price Drop protection for 90 days. This is a benefit I haven’t seen in a while on a card! With this, if you buy something and it drops in price, you can file a claim for the difference for 90 days.