How much to live on

Organgrinder

@LL_USS there are many good deals around. Some well over two years long.

Just use it for all your normal spending and transfer that amount into savings (mine are in ISAs). Make sure you don't have big penalties and you can afford the monthly minimum payment. If in a flexible ISA you can always use this if need be.

At the end of the interest free period pay it off in full and bingo, there's a nice bit of cash to spend. Or transfer the balance to an interest free card and carry on gaining the interest.

If you search stoozing calculator it will give you an idea of how much you can make in order to maximise "how much you have to live on". 

LL_USS

Thank you @Organgrinder

I searched for card options on MSE, but now i remember I went to the option of "up to 24m"

Let me try with this one and see how it goes. The direct debit for the minimum monthly payment is from the account that receives my monthly salary so it should be fine to cover this.

I plan to keep my ISAs intact so i think I'll still use GIAs to keep the money to pay back the balance (trying to keep the interest under my tax-free allowance).

May I ask, say after 24m I pay off this amount, then I can start another round of 24m on the same card, right?

Organgrinder

No you'll need a new card.

kempiejon

LL_USS said:

Thank you @Organgrinder

I searched for card options on MSE, but now i remember I went to the option of "up to 24m"

Let me try with this one and see how it goes. The direct debit for the minimum monthly payment is from the account that receives my monthly salary so it should be fine to cover this.

I plan to keep my ISAs intact so i think I'll still use GIAs to keep the money to pay back the balance (trying to keep the interest under my tax-free allowance).

May I ask, say after 24m I pay off this amount, then I can start another round of 24m on the same card, right?

That looks like you're planning to invest your stoozed balance into the stock market for up to 24 months. The currrent wrinkle of stooozing is the lowly tax allowances. I have been more creative with some stoozed money but what did you hope to buy in your GIA?

Once the first term ends one usually looks around for new offers with new suppliers. However one can run several cards concurrently. I have a handful of cards with stoozed balances. There has been good options for a couple of years following a bit of a drought of low interest rates.

hugheskevi

In case it is useful to anyone considering Stoozing, over the years that I have been Stoozing I find the display below the most convenient for managing the cards in my spreadsheets. My wife and I currently have about £70K of credit card borrowing, and for the last 15 years we have typically had between £50K-£70K at any given time.

I have individual entries for each card my wife and I have (my actual spreadsheets show who has the card, and the card provider). The highlighted cells are when a lump sum payment will be due at the end of an offer. 

I keep another table that records each card limit, the current usage, the used/available percentage, the balance/income ratio, the offer expiry date, and the amount left on 0% spending cards until I reach 95% of the card balance. These are for each individual card and also give the combined totals. Once I reach full spending on a 0% spending card, I keep usage just below 95% by buying gift cards through our work discount scheme for supermarkets. That makes it easy, as then we are only using a single 0% purchases card at any time for general purchases.

For Balance Transfer cards, I set each card with a regular Direct Debit amount equal to slightly more than the first payment due. For 0% Spending cards I set a regular payment equal to the amount due if I had 100% credit utilisation (although I don't put cards above 95%). This ensures the card provider reports more than the minimum payment is being made and I am not very close to limit. It probably makes trivial if any difference compared to just paying minimum though. It is also marginally more convenient for tracking in spreadsheets.

The "Combined total" figure at the bottom feeds into the amount of cash I need in our current account for each future month. The cash released is then used for my highest financial priority. That has changed over time, sometimes it has been pension, sometimes ISA, and sometimes mortgage. I always ensure from my cashflow forecasts that I will have enough money to repay all cards assuming I cannot borrow any more in the future, then as more borrowing happens it releases funds that can be used for the highest financial priority and so the cycle continues. At the moment funds released just go into a cash ISA. As offers end I close down cards and delete them from the table above.

I try to make multiple new applications at the same time, several months apart. That ensures the effect of hard searches has waned since my last round of applications, and all cards previously paid off have been removed from my record. Hence why there are no cards falling due for payment between June and October.

The effort involved is trivial, just a few rounds each year of opening and closing cards and entering new details into spreadsheets, which then automatically update everything, along with routine spreadsheet updating to take account of payments made.

The compounded gains from Stoozing over the years for us now probably run into six figures, they are certainly many tens of thousands of pounds. The gains are quite a bit higher as I have had pensions with higher rate tax relief, ISAs, and mortgage balances available for the funds raised from Stoozing (which was effectively bringing financial plans forward, with the cards then repaid from salary income and/or new funds from future borrowing), but even if I had just used savings accounts throughout the gains would still have been tens of thousands.

Fee-free balance transfers are great and the heart of Stoozing. 0% spending cards ensure a steady supply of new balances to transfer. For most of the time, I have also had 0% fee money transfer cards, which were great in generating credit card balances to transfer elsewhere to maximise gains. However, both fee-free balance transfers and 0% fee money transfer cards seem a bit thin on the ground now, though compared to the past, which eats into profits a bit.

Not saying the above methods are suitable for everyone, or even the best possible, but thought it might be useful for folks to see how I've found it best to manage after many years of doing it.

UKX69

Absolutely and hugely impressive! Great organising. 👍

Plasticman

hugheskevi said:

In case it is useful to anyone considering Stoozing, over the years that I have been Stoozing I find the display below the most convenient for managing the cards in my spreadsheets. My wife and I currently have about £70K of credit card borrowing, and for the last 15 years we have typically had between £50K-£70K at any given time.

I have individual entries for each card my wife and I have (my actual spreadsheets show who has the card, and the card provider). The highlighted cells are when a lump sum payment will be due at the end of an offer. 

I keep another table that records each card limit, the current usage, the used/available percentage, the balance/income ratio, the offer expiry date, and the amount left on 0% spending cards until I reach 95% of the card balance. These are for each individual card and also give the combined totals. Once I reach full spending on a 0% spending card, I keep usage just below 95% by buying gift cards through our work discount scheme for supermarkets. That makes it easy, as then we are only using a single 0% purchases card at any time for general purchases.

For Balance Transfer cards, I set each card with a regular Direct Debit amount equal to slightly more than the first payment due. For 0% Spending cards I set a regular payment equal to the amount due if I had 100% credit utilisation (although I don't put cards above 95%). This ensures the card provider reports more than the minimum payment is being made and I am not very close to limit. It probably makes trivial if any difference compared to just paying minimum though. It is also marginally more convenient for tracking in spreadsheets.

The "Combined total" figure at the bottom feeds into the amount of cash I need in our current account for each future month. The cash released is then used for my highest financial priority. That has changed over time, sometimes it has been pension, sometimes ISA, and sometimes mortgage. I always ensure from my cashflow forecasts that I will have enough money to repay all cards assuming I cannot borrow any more in the future, then as more borrowing happens it releases funds that can be used for the highest financial priority and so the cycle continues. At the moment funds released just go into a cash ISA. As offers end I close down cards and delete them from the table above.

I try to make multiple new applications at the same time, several months apart. That ensures the effect of hard searches has waned since my last round of applications, and all cards previously paid off have been removed from my record. Hence why there are no cards falling due for payment between June and October.

The effort involved is trivial, just a few rounds each year of opening and closing cards and entering new details into spreadsheets, which then automatically update everything, along with routine spreadsheet updating to take account of payments made.

The compounded gains from Stoozing over the years for us now probably run into six figures, they are certainly many tens of thousands of pounds. The gains are quite a bit higher as I have had pensions with higher rate tax relief, ISAs, and mortgage balances available for the funds raised from Stoozing (which was effectively bringing financial plans forward, with the cards then repaid from salary income and/or new funds from future borrowing), but even if I had just used savings accounts throughout the gains would still have been tens of thousands.

Fee-free balance transfers are great and the heart of Stoozing. 0% spending cards ensure a steady supply of new balances to transfer. For most of the time, I have also had 0% fee money transfer cards, which were great in generating credit card balances to transfer elsewhere to maximise gains. However, both fee-free balance transfers and 0% fee money transfer cards seem a bit thin on the ground now, though compared to the past, which eats into profits a bit.

Not saying the above methods are suitable for everyone, or even the best possible, but thought it might be useful for folks to see how I've found it best to manage after many years of doing it.

Makes my efforts feel a bit amateur by comparison! Well done

Organgrinder

I'm clearly a total amateur!!!

That is hugely impressive. 

LL_USS

@hugheskevi it will be a very loooong time until I reach that level of sophistication in stoozing management. I will learn from this and start from small. A couple of questions if you don't mind please:
(1) i thought the direct debit for the minimum payment is set up automatically rather than us setting the level, so if the credit card for May 2025 asks for say £34.5 then the direct debit will just be £34.5, isn't it?
(2) I can see my credit card usage last year (all cards) was about 20K, so i thought this new 0% interest card with a limit of 15K can cover much of it (15K was the maximum they give in the application and I chose it, but not sure if they'd give that max). Perhaps I should apply for another 0% card then.

@kempiejon: I am still just learning this so I'll just do the easy options first, I suppose. Under 24m I cannot put in S&S but I'll put in the highest cash saving accounts I can find during the time of using this 0% interest credit card.

LL_USS

@kempiejon agree on the low tax free allowance for saving interest. I've always tried to make sure the GIA interest is below 500 but as I put all incomes over the threshold for 20% tax into pension, I am trying to keep GIA interest under 1,000 this year (this 1,000 max interest is counted towards the total income before tax, which is for me to keep under the 40% tax threshold). If I get this 1,000 in interest, supposedly from the stoozed money I think I should be already happy about my first attempt. All other savings will go into pension/ISA/LISA.

GIA interest rates will just fall further I suppose, and rare no fee balance transfer deals.... I guess I am joining stoozing at the time when it's less profitable, but it's okay :-)