worth using balance transfer?

tommo817

Hi all, my first post so go easy!
I have two credit cards at the moment, a capital one cashback card which I use for most of my monthly spending. Balance rarely goes above 1000 and it is always paid off in full every month.
I also have an MBNA platinum card, balance zero, which I rarely use and if I do its also payed off in full every month.
What I'd like to know is, can I pay off the capital one card with the mbna card in an attemp to gain another months credit on what I have already bought? (a poor attempt of stoozing if you like)
I have never done a balance transfer before, so dont know the ins and outs of it or if its going to cost me anything to do which will wipe out any gain.

your thoughts?

dylanuk

Hi,

If you're just doing a balance transfer to cover your month's worth of purchases, the transfer fee, which is about 3%, wouldn't make it worth it if you can clear the balance now.

Stoozing becomes profitable when you transfer a decent amount of cash and put the cash into savings for the length of the 0% offer, say 12 months. After 12 months you'd then hopefully of made enough back in interest from having the cash in savings to outweigh the cost of the transfer fee and have a some left over for profit.

With 0% balance transfer credit cards you can only transfer money to them during a window period - around 30 to 90 days, so much shorter than the length of the actual 0% period offered. Which means you can't just keep transferring money over month to month to then save the money you would be using to clear your regular spending credit card.

Hope this makes sense.

tommo817

thanks, yes that does make sense.

benf90

Just thought I'd add to what dylanuk has put as it doesn't sound like the OP is in any introductory period so fees and/or when to do BTs may not apply.

All the credit cards I've ever used are interest free (when clearing the full balance) on purchases only.

So, even if you could do a balance transfer with no fee it's likely you'd get charged interest on that balance transfer from the day you do it.

Different scenario, but the end result is the same; Not worth the effort.