0% credit card for six months, is it worth it?

Something to bear in mind is that the 2% is usually charged as a purchase. This means that you'll pay standard interest on the 2% charge for the lifetime of the balance, because the balance will be paid off first.

- Ian

I had taken that into account, as I said is it worth the hassle, I think not. Mark

It is worth reading the small print. A 2 per cent fee is about the same as the interest you will get, BUT some of the cc 0 percent deals put a MAXIMUM fee to be charged (often 50 quid), so it might be worth getting more than you need transferred over, then put the remainder in a high interest account till you need to repay it. This is called stoozing.

It is quite possible to earn a substantial amount this way.

mrcheerful

No.

If you are a tax payer, you will pay tax on the interest you earn, so your 5% gross becomes 4% per year. Then you only get the money for 6 months, so you need to half that yearly value. So you should get 2%.

Then as you say, you wont get the interest on the complete amount for the whole six months as you will need to make the minimum payments to the credit card, plus you will need to pay off the credit card a few days before the end of the six months to allow time the the transaction to be processed. Looks like you will make a small loss.

I'm surprised that credit card companies are not forced to quote an APR which includes the fee.

However, there are still some good transfer deals, see:

Gareth

Not on the two I've got, it's charged as a "fee", and interest and fees are paid before anything else. So the minimum payment pays them.

At 14:56:02 on 21/06/2006, Ian Chard delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Usually? I only came across one company that does that.