One of the biggest mistakes people make with credit cards and points is that they focus on bonus categories, sign-up bonuses, and transfer partners — but they don’t think about their baseline earn.

Baseline earn is one of the most important concepts in points and credit card strategy.

Baseline earn = the minimum return you get on your everyday spending.

Think of this as your default card — the card you use for anything that doesn’t fall into a bonus category.

You may still use other cards for:

But for everything else — everyday shopping, random purchases, utilities, bills, taxes, etc. — you need a catch-all card. That card determines your baseline earn.

For many people, their baseline earn is around 1-2%.

But what if your baseline earn could be 3.5%+?

The reason the Bilt Palladium card is so interesting is that it can effectively push your baseline earn above 3.5% on everyday spend, which is unprecedented for a transferable points ecosystem.

The key idea is:

Use Bilt Palladium as your catch-all card and make it your baseline earn card.

If you care about airline or hotel status, it may still make sense to put spend on airline or hotel cards even if the earn is similar or slightly lower, but for pure points earning, Bilt can become your baseline.

The enhanced earn rate is tied to your mortgage amount and your everyday spending.

Here’s a simplified example:

If your mortgage is $3,000/month, that’s $36,000 per year.

You can effectively earn enhanced rewards on everyday spending up to that amount. When you combine:

Your effective earn rate can reach roughly 3.55% on everyday spend.

This might not sound like a huge difference compared to 1-2%, but it’s massive over time.

There are two ways to earn additional value through the Bilt ecosystem when it comes to rent or mortgage payments:

Both methods allow you to earn points on rent or mortgage payments without fees, but they work differently.

The first method is the spend unlock method.

With this method, you earn points on rent or mortgage payments based on how much everyday spending you put on the card.

In simple terms:

This method effectively rewards people who use the card heavily for everyday spending. If you already plan to put a lot of spend on your catch-all card, this method can be very valuable because your everyday spend unlocks additional housing points automatically.

This is the higher-maintenance method because you need to track your spending to make sure you unlock the full housing points each month.

The second method is the Bilt Cash method, which is simpler and more passive.

Bilt Cash is essentially a second rewards currency that you earn from everyday spending. You can then use Bilt Cash to unlock points on rent or mortgage payments or redeem it for statement credits and other rewards.

The key rule is:

This effectively allows you to convert everyday spending into additional housing points and extra rewards.

The reason many people prefer the Bilt Cash method is because Bilt Cash rolls over automatically, so you don’t have to worry about hitting specific spending thresholds each month.

When you combine:

Your effective return on everyday spending increases significantly.

In practice, this can add roughly:

Which means your effective everyday earn rate can increase meaningfully beyond the base earn rate.

The reason this matters is not just the earn rate — it’s the transfer partners.

Bilt has one of the strongest transfer partner lists in the industry, which means you can redeem points for outsized value.

Bilt Transfer Partners (By Category)

These are very useful for:

These are some of the most valuable transfer partners, especially:

Flying Blue is useful for:

Virgin and Emirates can be very useful for premium cabin redemptions.

Hyatt is generally considered the most valuable hotel transfer partner by far.

Let’s look at a real example.

There are nights available Jan 2027 (10 months from time of writing) at Alila Ventana Big Sur for 45,000 points per night.

A two-night stay would be:

That same stay would cost $4,348 in cash.

In this example, that means:

You’re getting about 4.83 cents per point in value.

If your everyday spend earns effectively 3.55% in Bilt points, and you redeem those points at 4.83 cents per point, your effective return becomes:

~17% return on everyday spend.

That is an insane return for non-bonus category spending.

Most people focus too much on:

But over time, the biggest driver of points accumulation is actually:

Your baseline earn rate.

If you increase your baseline earn from:

That’s a 75-250% increase in points on all your everyday spending.

Over years, that difference can equal:

The strategy is simple:

This is how you build a points strategy that actually moves the needle.

Most people spend a lot of time and energy trying to earn more money, but they don’t spend much time optimizing how they spend it.

If you only change one thing in your credit card strategy, it should be this: Raise your baseline earn.

Because once your baseline earn goes up, every dollar you spend starts working harder for you.

And that’s really what Money + Points is about: Helping people earn more and get more value from money and points.