Almost two years ago to the day, Bilt added Alaska Airlines as a transfer partner and with it came a unique (at the time) feature. In exchange for paying a 3% fee, you could pay your rent through Bilt and earn 3X on your Alaska card.
That became even more interesting with the advent of Alaska’s new Atmos Rewards loyalty program as it meant that your rent spend could also help you earn elite status with Alaska even more easily.
Well, Alaska is now not the only game in town when it comes to 3X earnings on rent and easier status achievement. That’s because Bilt has announced that the Air France KLM Visa Signature credit card now does the same.
Similar to the Alaska Airlines setup, paying for your rent through Bilt on an Air France/KLM credit card will incur a 3% fee, but you’ll earn 3X Flying Blue miles on up to $50,000 rent spend per year (i.e. maxing out at $4,167 per month on average). Interestingly, the Bilt announcement doesn’t mention that there’ll be a 3% fee, but View From The Wing has stated that it will be incurred.
The Bilt announcement also mentions the cap of $50,000 spend and the cap of up to 75,000 bonus miles. That might seem strange initially, but it’s because the Air France/KLM card earns 1.5X miles on otherwise non-bonused spend, so paying your rent with the card earns an additional 1.5X, hence the limit of 75,000 bonus miles as that’s what would be earned with $50,000 rent spend.
In addition to effectively buying Flying Blue miles for one cent per point, that spend will also contribute towards the ability to earn elite status. At the time of publishing this post, the Air France KLM card welcome offer includes 100 XP (Experience Points) which is Flying Blue’s metric for earning status. You then earn 20 XP when renewing the card each year, while spend can also earn XP. At card renewal, you’ll earn an 80 XP bonus if you’ve spent $15,000+ in the previous cardholder year, and an additional 60 XP if you’ve spent $25,000+ in the previous cardholder year.
Let’s say you don’t intend to use the Air France/KLM card for anything other than your rent. If you spend $25,000 per year on rent (that’s $2,083.33 per month), at renewal you’d earn a total of 160 XP. If you didn’t have any Flying Blue status before that, 100 XP would be used to upgrade to Silver status, with 60 XP remaining. Flying Blue Gold status requires 180 XP once you’ve earned Silver status, so you’d need to earn an extra 120 XP over the course of the next 12 months. If you achieve that, Gold status would become easier to retain in future years as you’d only need 180 XP. If 160 XP were earned through credit card spend, you’d only need to earn 20 XP through flights or other methods.
It might be even easier than that though if you already have Platinum elite status with Bilt Rewards. That’s because one of the benefits for Platinum members is a match to Flying Blue Gold status provided you transfer 10,000 Bilt points to Flying Blue. If you take advantage of that match and spend $25,000 on the Air France/KLM card over the course of the next year, you’d earn 160 XP of the 180 XP needed to retain Flying Blue Gold status beyond that.
Spending $25,000 on rent would involve a cost of $750 due to the 3% fee, but you’d earn 75,000 miles, plus you’d be within touching distance of Flying Blue Gold status. That in turn gets you SkyTeam Elite Plus status which could be particularly helpful if flying domestically with Delta.
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How about paying mortgage with the Flying Blue card? Is it a possibility?
Dang!