Pictured: the kind of direct dopamine hit that Zoomers can only dream of

I think my boredom of writing about Bilt is only matched by your boredom of reading about it, so let’s do something more fun for a Friday before many of us prepare to bunker down for a stormy weekend.

Despite being somewhere around the median person described in the /r/churning demographic survey every year, a lot of my closest collaborators are somewhat older or younger than me, give or take a few years.

I think there’s a ton of positive output that comes out of working with people in a different cohort because they approach things in a different way. That being said, readers younger and older than me likely won’t have the same feeling of nostalgia for today’s hijinks. Don’t worry, I’ll set some context!

Regardless of how you feel about social media, you can’t deny that the dominant platform of the time left an indelible mark of the generation that was coming of age then.

For elder millennials, Gen X and beyond, you had access to the early platforms- things like bulletin boards, IRC, Xanga and Livejournal.

For Gen Z and younger, you were bombarded by Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook post-college requirement, Vine, Periscope, TikTok, YikYak, the list goes on and on.

But somewhere in between those cohorts was (in my humble opinion) the golden age of social media – MySpace. Connected enough to find something new outside of your network, but not completely beholden to an ever-evolving algorithm, MySpace felt like it struck the balance between fun and toxicity (let’s just ignore that whole top 8 thing, ok?)

One big difference between MySpace and all of the modern platforms was that it wasn’t centered around an activity feed of your friends. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a way to share activity, though. Bulletins were messages that showed in a small secondary feed that all of your friends could see.

There were many ways that bulletins were used, but no doubt the most iconic usage was MySpace surveys. Essentially “never have I ever” turned into a quantifiable score, these surveys were a fun way to share tastes in music and movies or lie about things that you hadn’t actually done to look cooler to classmates.

So, in honor of that more simple time of “rawr XD”, “PC4PC” and “*holds up spork*”, I vibe coded the MS & churning edition for you to take for funsies.

Click here to take the survey.

Let me know what category you end up in! For those of you staring down the barrel of some serious snowfall this weekend, good luck. This feels like a great weekend to run some couch plays instead.

Kuchemerera!

Pictured: What we’ve lost as a result of no longer having MySpace

Pictured: Charles de Gaulle when he was a child, aka the current adult height of butterboy

Editor’s note: Thanks to my friend, and one of the funniest churners I know, the vertically challenged butterboy, for today’s guest post. Only he could look at 20th-century French history and see a metaphor for churning/MS. Enjoy the post!

History has the remarkable power to inform us on a variety of topics, and, in particular, historical figures can teach us valuable lessons about subjects seemingly unrelated. Today, on my dear friend Riley’s blog, it would be my pleasure to share some thoughts about Charles de Gaulle, Gaullism, and how I believe they relate to our hobby of churning and manufactured spend.

If you have ever read about or studied General Charles de Gaulle, a single word will pop into your head: France. The General, who saved France twice over the course of his life, was born into a fiercely patriotic family in the Third French Republic. From a young age, he idolized France, studying her history, crying when he learned of her military defeats. As soon as he was able, he joined the French military, fighting in the First World War. Later, as France succumbed to the tyranny sweeping the European continent, he saved the reputation of France from collaboration as the leader of the Free French. Again, when colonial squabbles and military putschists threatened the institutions of the Fourth French Republic, de Gaulle returned from his retirement to save her once more. 

To take away one lesson from history, Charles de Gaulle allowed himself to be consumed by one thing: France. France, the grandeur of France, and advancing French interests were the sole focus of de Gaulle throughout his whole life. De Gaulle became associated with an amorphous ideology called Gaullism. To its proponents, Gaullism was not a checklist of policies but a mindset: the relentless actualization of France’s independence, prestige, and power. In this, it was broadly successful.

In churning, I see many of my peers spread thin. They dabble in a variety of targets and banks, but they lack a clear direction. They miss the opportunity to maximize their limited time and effort by focusing on what they do best and what they can scale, instead favoring a shallow familiarity with everything. Did the General understand every nuance of domestic and foreign policy? Of course not. Did he make massive gaffes that exposed his blind spots? Absolutely. But the General maximized his impact on the world through tunnel vision about France. I believe many of us who churn would benefit from behaving more like the General – picking our “France” and committing to it fully.

As for your “France,” I cannot say. You already know what it is.

-butterboy

Pictured: How butterboy sees Charles de Gaulle

Editor’s Note: Sorry these are coming at you fast and furious. This post was originally scheduled for earlier in the week, but Richard Kerr and Bilt messed up my editorial calendar. At least it’s been good to brush up on multiplication tables?

The churning and MS community has some level of natural cyclicity and, well, churn to it. For example, the start and end of the year is always more buzzy as the last chance to finish up things tied to annual caps and the first chance to knock them out again hours into the new year. Widespread shutdowns generally coax a lot of people out of hibernation, too. 

Even on a personal level, you might get slammed at work or have something going on with family and friends that necessitates a step back, at least temporarily. 

All of this to say that we all have a lot going on both including and excluding MS, and it’s only natural to see plenty of names wax and wane depending on what’s going on (outside of victims of email jobs like myself who are chronically around).

However, this truth hasn’t stopped me from hearing a lot of chatter lately across the churnosphere that essentially boils down to “I haven’t heard from X in awhile – they used to be such a big contributor, where did they go?”. 

There’s plenty of reasons someone might not be around, and in some cases, it’s just because they’re busy. But in 2026, it might also be that they’ve decided to take a break from sharing sensitive things in groups that are private, but don’t feel as private anymore. 

The whales (and dolphins even) have seen so many good things die in the last couple years that sharing something outside of a probe group suddenly feels like it has zero utility compared to a few years ago.

It’s partially a symptom of how easy MS has been lately, of course – sharing a new target now is very different than sharing a particular Kroger in rural Michigan that DGAF how many gift cards you buy, because everybody can start hitting it without it being necessary to take a flight to Frankenmuth (I chose Frankenmuth because of the funny name, but it actually looks quite lovely!) 

I understand why many heavy hitters are choosing now as the time to reconsider their feelings towards sharing, even in private. We’re losing easy levers by the day, and no amount of Slack, Discord or Telegram reactions can bring them back. 

But I also understand why beginners and more intermediate players are bummed out to see those handles gradually disappear from the private groups – that build up of knowledge gleaned from years of grinding is really insightful when you’re trying to scale up. 

So, are whales actually going extinct? While the fintechs and banks are certainly trying a little too hard to pretend they’re the captain of the Pequod, there’s still enough low hanging fruit out there to make the juice worth the squeeze. 

What is a shrimp or reef fish to do? If it were me, I’d work towards scaling to a bigger body of water or finding a group of like-minded fish ready to grow together. The only constant is change, and the game will continue to change in both good and bad ways over the next year. But now that MS can be done fully from the couch, I wouldn’t count on sharing ever returning in quite the same way it used to be.

Prost!

I was fully expecting that the usual suspects like MEAB and myself would be the only people seated in the peanut gallery for yesterday’s big Bilt launch, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were plenty of prominent voices calling out that the new program was unnecessarily complicated (outside of the absurd headlines in the Daily Mail, lmao).

There’s still an angle if you are like my good friend Andrew that I forgot to h/t in yesterday’s article (sorry dude!) and both have an existing Bilt card that was product changed sans hard pull and are an advanced MSer that can squeeze strong value out of uncapped 2%. 

However, I also noted in yesterday’s article that one of my major reasons for avoiding this whole launch was the anti-MS slant from both Cardless and Richard Kerr. This was reinforced with the whole banana shtick that was prevalent throughout the press release.

Honestly, the more I thought about it, the banana thing was almost funny in a wink-wink nudge-nudge way because it called back to the fact that Bilt was built (ba-dum-tss) by people who cut their teeth in the MS world. 

Significantly less funny was something else shared by the Bilt team, insinuating (in a non-fitting meme format, of course) that all of Bilt’s customers are “basement dwelling redditors trying to cheat their rent system”. This spread like wildfire, even among the Bilt subreddit full of non-gamers that are just trying to get a leg up on rent and mortgage payments. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought of openly insulting my customer base on launch day as the greatest way to aid in new customer acquisition.

But hey, I’m just some idiot in the peanut gallery, so maybe I’m wrong. If nothing else, it certainly distracted from the whole “bro please bro just earn Bilt cash to use it to “unlock” earning points on rent even though the whole point of this card is paying rent please bro”

Anywho, that’s all for today. You have choices about where to bring your spend (and corresponding extreme volume of interchange fees for banks), so choose wisely. 

Живели!  

I write quite a bit about how the hobby has changed as a result of widespread exposure. The evidence is all over the place – for example, when I went to visit my parents over the holidays, I fielded “best card” questions from pretty much all of their friends. It’s kind of endearing in a way.

I don’t have to explain to any of you why people are naturally interested in the idea of free travel, points and money, and there’s neverending churning content out there in every form you can think of. From business traveler blogs down to gen alpha TikTok videos, reward cards have never had a moment quite like they’re having right now. 

To go along with big new benefits, there are big new annual fees, which come with big new customer acquisition budgets and big new affiliate payouts. That’s all well and good – the big banks have marketing budgets so huge that why wouldn’t they make sure to involve the influencers in the space to help get the word out? 

It’s the duty of the Brian Kellys of the world to get the word out when a big bank launches something new and shiny (especially when Brian Kelly is an “adviser and investor” of said program, lol), so it’s not surprising when everybody is abuzz with a new launch. 

You’ll no doubt hear the march of the Bilt PR drum over the next weeks (if not months), and there are some interesting changes. Gone is the absurdly expensive partnership between Bilt and Wells Fargo, and in is fintech Cardless, known for just two weeks ago being so kind as to let people open two whole cards with them in their lifetime.  

Two cards per lifetime is probably fine unless you really need the Qatar card (because Avios are so hard to come by, right?) and since you can’t pay rent or your mortgage on the LATAM or TAP card, the new Bilt portfolio is your best bet. 

I know this started a little sarcastic, but the Bilt cards do have some interesting angles. Mesa spontaneously combusting leaves Bilt as one of few housing games left in town, they have some solid transfer partners (and awesome transfer bonuses on “Rent Day”), and any uncapped 2x card is always worth a quick look by any MSer worth their salt. 

However, I can’t help but feel a little skeptical of this launch. First, they attached plenty of strings to earning on rent while simultaneously adding some weird quasi-currency that is separate from the points you’re used to earning. 

There’s nothing consumer friendly quite like earning two different currencies and requiring specific transactions involving the new currency to use the card for its whole value prop, am I right?

Of course, those are the main drawbacks for beginning churners. For MSers, there’s the more obvious one – that one of the main voices driving product at Bilt is a former MSer that now takes to Twitter to vaguely threaten MSers. While this provides endless entertainment on reddit, it just doesn’t make me froth at the mouth to apply for a card they’re involved with the way that Big Blog would like me to.

Pictured: The immortal legend of Cracker Barrel is invoked to confuse some earnest Bilt users, circa weird Tweeting days

Somehow, I just think the phrase “manufactured spend” might show up in the terms and conditions once or twice. After checking, the answer is 6, which I certainly would have taken as the under if I was looking at the O/U. 

Anyway, I can see some ways to make money with this card, but I’m not sure I’d listen to the blogosphere chorus talking about how amazing it is. In today’s economic atmosphere of apprehension around credit seeking and new inquiries, the napkin math doesn’t do it for me. But that’s just my situation, and if it works for you, go for it! 

This is just a reminder to critically think about the swirl of PR language that inevitably accompanies a new product launch, even on the major churning blogs. Only you can tell for yourself if something new is worth adding to your wallet. 

Ofa atu!

The word loop is one of those many words in the churning and MS world that can mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask, kind of similar to how the whole hobby doesn’t have a universally accepted name. 

In a lot of places, it’s simply used as a synonym for play, which is kind of right, but also not. Play itself is fairly ambiguous and is essentially a single unit of MS, whatever that is. And while all loops are plays, not all plays are loops. 

A loop implies that you’re moving or converting assets from one account or form to another (and possibly even more in the middle) before it eventually ends up right back where it started. 

A common one that all of us are familiar with and doesn’t require cryptic reference is the ‘ol stand-by of street MS. You go out to a gas station, office supply store or similar and buy gift cards with a card that earns in that bonus category. From there, you liquidate those gift cards back into money in your account, that you use to pay off the credit card. Once the card is paid, the loop is complete.

While the bonus category is important, the true measurement of your earnings is how fast and how inexpensively you can get that money back into your account and ready to pay off the card, reset the credit limit, and start the loop again. 

If you can get the funds back in your account a day or two later with something around a 1% fee, you’re doing quite well. If the cards sit in your closet waiting to be used to prepay the next six months of utilities, it’s not as exciting. Earning high bonus categories on things like electricity or your mortgage is cool, but isn’t life changing in the same way that high volume is.

Speed is everything when you’re running loops, and optimizing your ability to move money while staying within the limits of your targets and settlement times is key to big profits. To hear it in a much more succinct and clear way, some of the best MS writing out there is MEAB’s velocity of money series.

Of course, there’s plenty of other loops out there, and not all of them even involve talking to a real person in real life. A true closed circuit loop is ideal, where you can move from funding account to target back to funding account seamlessly. Some do exist, but there is generally some level of asset conversion that occurs that entails slowing down, high cost, regulatory red tape, or some combination of all three. 

True closed circuit loops are few and far between these days, and moving money in and out from the same account isn’t exactly the smartest way to avoid an unfun conversation with a compliance offer. 

A loop being more complicated doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing, and sometimes adding additional segments to this MS roller coaster means increased earnings. Case in point – you have two targets that don’t accept loading in the same way, but there is an intermediary step that helps you earn some extra on the way back into your account, while avoiding the in & and out from the same account that makes you look suspicious. 

There are loops everywhere in this hobby, and it’s not necessarily just the individual loops that you’re running yourself. The loop that is working well for a whole lot of people in the rewards arbitrage space right now is just moving assets in a circle as the various middlemen arb a cut from it, before it ends up essentially right where it started a week later.

In a vacuum, it all sounds rather silly, and it is. But these arbitrage opportunities are real, and grabbing your bit of edge in the equation is the key to being a MS advantage player. 

Generally, closing the loop faster involves things that are somewhat inconvenient. Checking platforms daily, significant obfuscation of how much cash you are actually working with, and spending way too much time at the Fedex store are all annoying to deal with. But definitely not as annoying as earning ⅓ as much as you could be on the same loops because you can’t ride them over and over again. 

There’s one final thought on loops to share. Just because you can run a loop doesn’t mean you should. Rare loops that can be run at very high volume at very high speed at extremely low margin aren’t quite as intriguing when you factor in the risk of the target going scorched earth.

Pictured: MSers with a big appetite for risk who had set the launch velocity too high on their shuttle loop without checking the length of the spike element

Good luck on the ride this week, friends.

Napaykuna!