Reinvesting interesting free credit?

Apr 29, 2004 15 Replies

I just received Egg card today with a 10,000 credit limit and was thinking of taking advantage of the 0% offer (until 1/10).



If I were to transfer 9,000 into my ING account, other than paying the 2% monthly credit card charge is there anything else I should know or be aware of? Obviously I would not touch the ING account until the end of September.



Will this help or damage my credit rating? At the moment I have a very limited history and therefore do not want to do anything which my affect it.



Thanks, Louise


As you say, you would have to make sure you had enough to cover the minimum payments which woud be quite high for this amount!

It should help your rating assuming that you do manage to keep up your payments - a large amount of credit handled responsiblibly should certainly be better than keeping the limited history you have now.

I thought you can only transfer money to "pay off" another credit card OR "pay off" an overdraft - are you sure they let you move money to a savings account as you are not really paying anything off?

| I thought you can only transfer money to "pay off" another credit card OR "pay | off" an overdraft - are you sure they let you move money to a savings account as | you are not really paying anything off?

I actually wondered the same question, however I do not see how Egg would know whether there was an overdraft or not.

But as it's not a credit card would they not treat in as a cash advance in which case the interest would be even higher?

There's no problem with doing this - Egg don't care whether you have an overdraft or not. I've just done exactly the same thing, ie transferred

10,000 from the Egg card to my current account and then transferred it on to my IF savings account. It is definitely not treated as a cash advance, and there is no handling fee or interest to pay during the offer period.

Helen.

Don't touch the card either. Payments to the card are usually treated as paying off the balance transfer first, then the purchases at the higher rate of interest. Egg may be different, but I doubt it.

Egg also offer 0% on purchases. So after you make your minimum payment you can spend it again with no strings.

There must be something to prevent people becoming the "mother of all rate tarts" and taking out all the 0% deals that are on offer and ending up with about 100k sat in their ING account earning over 4k/year - there must be a catch somewhere or everyone would be doing it!

Heh - you obviously haven't been to the credit card board on the Motley Fool website :)

Well people do manage to run up credit card debts of £100k+. Of course if you take up all the offers at once, then there will be nowhere to refinance them when the deals are up.

What about tax implications on the interested accrued?

I must say I don't find this very interesting at all. Borrowing from Peter to lend to Paul? It's too proverbial.

If I were you I'd transfer the whole £10,000 to a bank account, and then move about £9,000 of that into your ING account. The repayments you'd need to make to Egg for that amount would be about £200 a month. You could repay that from the remaining money in your bank account while the rest of it sits in ING for 6 months earning interest at 4.5%

As long as you don't miss any repayments it will only enhance your credit rating.

I thought everybody was doing it. I've taken advantage of a series of

0% offers on a whole string of cards over the last couple of years. If there is a catch I've yet to see it because its worked for me, and I haven't paid a penny in interest or charges.

There are 3 catches

1 - A lot of cards will only do balance transfers to other cards, not to current accounts, so you need to funnel transfers via a card that will do transfers to current accounts (like Egg), or one that gives out free credit card cheques (like Mint).

2 - If you aren't well organized, you might miss a payment.

3 - Eventually, in theory, you won't be able to get any more cards.

The trick isn't in getting a huge balance on 0% cards, it's in keeping it up as the offers start to end.

For a home owner with a reasonable income, 100k isn't difficult to achieve; some people have had 350k.

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