Originally Posted by
dbh1
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).
We get offers in the mail that are 0% for 12-18 months. Those go in the shredder.
We don't need their $ and with financial institutions paying so little interest, those are not of interest to us. The only decent mailed offer was about 1.5 yrs ago when my wife got a targeted offer AMEX Gold with 50K MR points with no first year fee. That was long before the great offers that others took advantage earlier this year. We have, however, took advantage some of the great offers listed on FT & elsewhere. (FTG, etc)
If we get targeted for a large amount of signup points (50K or above), we may be interested depending on the value of the points. Offers for less than that (nearly all of them) get shredded. The AMEX offer described above was the only decent offer that came in the mail. That card was applied for (03/10, points posted & card cancelled earlier this year).