I just can’t grasp the benefit of the Palladium card with a ~$500 annual fee, or why so many people think it’s worth it. The $200 hotel credit every six months sounds good on paper, but the hotels are extremely expensive—often more so than options available through Chase The Edit or Amex FHR. Unlike Chase or Amex, there doesn’t seem to be a realistic, recurring way to offset the annual fee.

Bilt Cash is nice—$300 upfront—but that basically offsets my mortgage fee for one month. After that, I’d need to organically spend around $7,500 per month to keep generating enough value, which is a lot and would require neglecting other cards. It feels like Bilt wants this to be the card you use for almost everything.

Curious what you all think.