Originally Posted by
sdsearch
(For this reason, when doing 0% balance transfers, I try to not use up more than about 1/3, maybe close to 1/2 at most, of any particular card's total available credit. That way, no matter whether the bank looks at my total utilization overall, or my total utilization within that bank, or even my utilization on a card-by-card basis, they'll still be happy with me. Perhaps I'm more conservative than I need to be, but I prefer that to ending up like the OP!)
Sounds like a smart strategy to me. Before the Global Financial Crisis, I used to take $100-200k (across 3 or 4 cards) out at a time on 0% offers (with no fees) and invest it in T-bills around 3-4%. I ignored your advice, but credit was much more lax then. Now that it is close to impossible to find a true 0% transfer offer (i.e., without fees) and interest rates effectively at zero, the arbitrage is gone. There are still a lot of 0% purchase offers around, but with rates so low, I would rather pay them off and keep my credit score a bit higher for bonus churning. Though maybe I am missing out on some additional AA miles I could be earning in my BankDirect Account (probably one of the best risk free returns out there), I will probably remain too lazy to track when I need to switch from min payments to full balance (with a huge negative payoff if I am off by a month).