Speculative Bilt transfer bonuses | Coffee Break Ep112 | 6-30-26
Frequent Miler on the Air - Frequent Miler
The podcast challenges traditional wisdom on transferring points by exploring speculative bonuses with Chase Ultimate Rewards (Bilt). With Bilt 2.0's enhanced earning potential and capped transfer bonuses, the hosts deba
Key takeaways
- Bilt 2.0 enables massive point accumulation
Transcript preview
This is a VoI Escape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. Today's coffee break. Speculative built transfer bonuses. Welcome to Frequent Mileer's 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. Conventional wisdom tells us. don't transfer your points to specific loyalty programs until you have a specific use in mind. And that's important in general because once you do the transfer, you can't get those points back. They don't become transferable again if you change your mind about how you want to use them. So, you know, once you transfer to Aviunca Life Miles or something, you've got to use them as Aviunca Life Miles, for example. of conventional wisdom has basically gotten us through many, many years of points and miles. But then, you know, built came along and started changing things with these huge 100 percentage transfer bonuses that they fairly regularly offer. And I think there are aspects of built 2.0, especially that have made us really question that old conventional wisdom. And I think there are aspects of built 2.0, especially that have made us really question that old conventional wisdom. Yeah, you know, now with Bill 2.0, you can earn lots more build points than you ever could before because you have a 2X base earn rate if you've got the Palladium card. You can earn on rent and mortgage payments potentially now and you can even pay other people's mortgage with it. Alternatively, you could enable the booths on the Palladium card and be earning essentially three points per dollar on up to 25k spend if you split that up the right way. We won't dive into all the details there. But plenty of earn opportunities And then on top of that you got the Rakuten shopping portal where you can earn points from shopping online that can transfer to built. And if you get built elite status, it'll be one-to-one transfers. And you got built neighborhood of rewards. So you might just dine at a restaurant in your neighborhood and earn built points. If you link whatever card it is used to pay for your dining with built, then you can just automatically earn additional points on dining, potentially, pharmacy, other things in your neighborhood. So there are far more ways. And of the welcome bonuses on the cards now so there are more ways to earn points today than there would have been a year ago so I think a lot of us are stacking up more and more built points which makes us wonder okay well if we've stacked up a huge pile of built points which bonuses are worth going after yeah yeah and another thing that has changed besides the fact that earning hundreds of thousands of points is no longer a ridiculous idea now a lot of people are doing that that's I think an important factor is that with built 2.0 built has started capping their big transfer bonuses at 100,000 points and so you know it used to be reasonable to say well you know I'm gonna hold on to my points until either there's a perfect transfer bonus or until I need you know maybe high at points which you'll never see a transfer bonus for you know that made a lot of sense but now if you're earning hundreds of thousands of points and there's this cap on the on the hundred K transfer bonuses then like maybe waiting for the perfect transfer bonus isn't a great idea because you're not going to be able to you know use all your built points for that perfect transfer bonus if it ever comes around so to me that that makes a difference in like how much I want to consider at least taking advantage of any given transfer bonus, even if I don't have plans for the particular miles or hotel points that that transfer bonus is for. So that really changes things in a fundamental way than ever before. Absolutely. So let's talk about which ones are worth doing right after this. Jamie writes in, love the show, but I have no idea what you're talking about, please help. can be confusing and luckily for you Jamie we have a beginner's guide that can help you want to go to frequentmyler dot com slash start here to check out our full beginner's guide and we're back so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go through each of built's transfer partners and we're gonna ask this question if there was a hundred percent transfer bonus available to you up to a hundred thousand points and you didn't have you didn't already have a massive collection of those points. Is it worth doing that transfer bonus prospectively without having any idea how you're going to use those miles or hotel points? Yeah, and so when Greg says you don't already have a massive pile of those points, we mean the airliner hotel partner points, right? So if you have a massive pile of a massive pile of you have a massive pile of a massive pile of a massive pile of you have a massive pile of some pile of something, then you may not want more of it. But we're going to it. But we're going to we don't already have that huge pile of airline miles in this specific program or hotel points and say okay well if we get a hundred percent and we're simplifying there because built oftentimes has multiple tiers but we're gonna keep it simple and just say a hundred percent transfer bonus would you or would you not so let's start with airline programs and i'll ask you Greg if there were a hundred percent transfer bonus to Alaska atmas rewards would you or would you not take that one up speculatively in a heartbeat i mean Alaska is one of built's best transfer partners, their miles are so valuable for so many things that getting double is a great deal. So absolutely, yes. Very good. What about Southwest Airlines? Well, I would probably very seriously consider Southwest, and I don't find Southwest to be among the most exciting miles because they have a pretty fixed value, but they do have a pretty fixed value. So getting 100% transfer bonus would yield great results. And because we have two companion passes in my household, where very frequently looking at Southwest ahead of other airlines. So yep I would do Southwest although I think that that is maybe less universal I mean would you I'm more curious about you I think. Yeah the funny thing is I think I probably would so with with their new assigned seating I'd be more likely to book Southwest than I would before sometimes I'm booking flights for other family members that include Southwest flights and so being able to that those points so sort of cheaply if you think of it as sort of buying points with your built points that actually would be a great deal when that when that comes up so I would I would do that all right next up is United Airlines what do you think Nick would you transfer prospectively to United if there was ever a transfer bonus which we should we should caveat that there's certain programs that we don't expect to ever see a transfer bonus that we don't expect to ever see a transfer bonus to or at least not a massive one and United is one of those. United, yeah. So United is one that like we said, very unlikely, so this is just a theoretical exercise really. I would probably do this. I wouldn't be excited about it because I don't tend to use a lot of United Miles for exciting redemptions. However, domestically I very frequently see flights available for 15,000 miles each way and so essentially paying half that like 7,500 bill points each way is too good of a deal to pass up. So I wouldn't excited about it, but I would have a hard time saying no. So I think I would probably transfer to United. What about you? Would you be the same? I would do it in a heartbeat. So United Miles to me are, they're one of the best to have a big pile of, because you can often, they're often