One of the appealing features of the Bilt 2.0 cards is that they’re listed as having no foreign transaction fee, even the no annual fee Bilt Blue card. Well, it turns out that might not be strictly true.
Reader Joe gave us a heads up that Bilt is reportedly charging a 0.2% fee on foreign transactions and that certainly does seem to be the case.
When researching this, I came across this post on Reddit which follows further reports that a 0.2% fee is being charged when making purchases overseas. This 0.2% fee appears to arise from Mastercard which charges a 0.2% currency conversion fee for foreign transactions. Other credit card issuers that run on the Mastercard network and advertise no foreign transaction fees eat this fee themselves and don’t pass it on to the cardholder. That, of course, makes sense seeing as they’re advertising the card as having no foreign transaction fee and the 0.2% fee is being charged by Mastercard for conversion of said foreign transactions.
With the Bilt credit cards though, that’s not happening. There’s a very helpful explanation by Reddit user falxfour here which details their experience, not only on their new Bilt credit card, but with their Bilt 1.0 and separate Wells Fargo credit cards too. With overseas transactions charged to their original Bilt 1.0 card and a different Wells Fargo credit card, the amounts in a foreign currency listed on their statements matched what was expected based on Mastercard’s Currency Converter Calculator.
However, the calculations work differently on their Bilt 2.0 card, although it depends on where you look. This commenter identified that the transaction listing in the Bilt app matches the calculations that Mastercard makes via its Currency Converter Calculator, but the transaction listing on their statement is slightly higher as a result of the 0.2% currency conversion fee being added on.
Even though the fee being charged is only 0.2%, it’s completely unacceptable considering the cards are marketed as having no foreign transaction fee. My suspicion is that this fee is being charged in error as a result of the way that Cardless is administering the Bilt cards, rather than it being a deliberate choice made by Bilt. As a result, we’ll hopefully see cardholders getting a refund for all the foreign transactions that have been overcharged since the Bilt 2.0 cards went live, with the 0.2% fee not being charged going forward, but that remains to be seen.
We’ve reached out to Bilt to highlight this problem and to get confirmation on their resolution for the overcharging that’s been going on. We’ll update this post if we receive a reply from them.
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Applied for the Palladium Card 2 weeks ago. Haven’t hear a peep from Bilt. Contacted their customer service by e-mail with no response. Over the phone, they said they would escalate the issue on Friday. The app still shows “Application under review.”
Asking only half tongue-in-cheek: has any candidate worked so hard to win the Bonvoyed award?
It also seems that they round off the 2x bonus or 4x bilt cash downwards. For example, my purchase of $21.36 on my palladium card looks like it earned 42 Bilt points, not 42.72 or 43. It earned $0.85 Bilt cash. That extra few percent they’re skimming off the top prob doesn’t amount to much, but it does leave a bad taste. It’s technically not 2x points and not 4x bilt cash…
That probably explains why my current balanced does not agree to the sum of all my charges. Its only off few bucks. I was going to wait for my 1st statement to reconcile.
This matches exactly what I experienced for a transaction in Euro this week. My initial pending charge was revised up by exactly 0.2% when it became final.
I don’t see any disclosures from Bilt about this charge and there’s no such charge in Bilt 1.0
Does the FM podcast still have multiple Bilt ads per episode?
I stopped listening a few months ago, but would love to restart if they’ve gotten rid of them.
Please find an advertiser who isn’t complete garbage and use them instead.
We don’t have any Bilt ads at the moment; we were running them for a couple of months, but it’s been a few weeks since we last had them on the podcast.
Thanks Stephen. Glad to hear it!
In their podcasts they are now shilling for some shady web site called Frequent Miler that nobody has ever heard of.
Also, FYI, we never had more than one ad per podcast episode.
You are very generous to assume this isn’t intentional. The rewards structure of the Bilt cards makes them tempting, but I just can’t get past the issue that I don’t like or trust them.
Dang another reason to stay the F out of Bilt
Another day, another problem with Bilt.
I reported earlier on another post that Bilt DOES NOT take into account refunds when calculating Points Accelerator tracker. So you make $5,000 in purchases, then refund those purchases and Bilt will ask you to pay ANOTHER $200 in Bilt Cash to activate another $5,000 round even though you are at zero spend. Of course, while removing points and BC from the refunded transactions. I have yet to hear back from them after creating a case a week ago.
That’s not a problem. It’s a feature. GL