FTR I’m perfectly happy earning below 1x on mortgage payments if there’s no fee

Based on Kerr's recent post which states:

you will always have the option to make your full rent or mortgage payment seamlessly through Bilt and without a transaction fee […] the more you use the card, the more you can earn. That can mean earning the full 1x on rent

As well as the post this morning, which shows the ability to split rent/mortgage payments between a "charged" amount to your BILT card along with ACH, it's pretty clear to me that we are going

• FROM 1x earn on rent/mortgage without a fee
• TO 0x – 1x on rent/mortgage without a fee

So, if you spend $1,000/mo on non-rent spending, you’d earn 4% as BILT cash = $40. If your rent is $2,000/mo, the total fee (assuming 3%) would be $60. You’d be able to cover $40 of that with your BILT cash balance. Thus, two-thirds of the rent payment would earn 1x and the remaining would earn 0x. That is an effective 0.67x earn rate.

Some months you may spend more on your BILT card to earn more BILT Cash, other months may be lower. As a result, your earn rate will be variable, but as long as you spend some amount on your BILT card (outside of rent/mortgage), then you're always earning points for free on payments you'd be making anyway.

There's really no downside. The only "down" part about this is relative to the gravy train we've all been riding the past few years. If we want BILT to succeed long term, something had to give and I appreciate the fact that they've found a way to still give us fee-free points earning while making a more sustainable business model AND refraining from doing what other issuers are doing by setting explicit thresholds to meet ($75k for lounge guests, other perks, etc).

My only disappointment in this (if the leaks hold true) is the lack of meaningful multipliers on category spend. I guess 2x catch-all is fine (immediately better than the CFU for catch-all Hyatt points), but I'd rather a more compelling mix of categories with 3x+ rates.

There's an argument to be made regarding opportunity cost of using BILT to pay for anything outside rent/mortgage at a relatively low rate of 1x – 2x for most categories (based on the leak), with a possible 3x on one category. The math gets complicated if you factor in cpp, but to keep it simple, personally as an optimizer, I'd likely only get the mid or top tier card and put spend on it in the 2x-3x range, with the 2x being on non-category spend.