So, in my recent excursions around the intarweb, I stumbled upon a moneymaking scheme known as the "app-o-rama" which has me somewhat intrigued. If you haven't heard of it, these are basically the steps:
1) Apply for several dozen credit cards all at once, picking ones with good bonuses and cashback, and most importantly including several that have 0% Balance Transfer for 12 mos. (and ideally very little transfer fee).
2) When all the cards come in, take out as much as you can in Balance Transfers from the 0% cards.
3) Take this money and put it in a 5% or 6% savings account for 11 months, then pay the cards back and keep the interest.
Obviously there are a lot more details, and while not illegal, this is certainly not encouraged by the CC companies, so you have to pay close attention to minimum monthly payments and other letter-of-the-law stuff. But if you're willing to put up with all the hassle and CSR-wrangling, and you're willing to have your credit score go down the crapper for a few months (it eventually comes back), you can actually make pretty good money -- $50K at 5.5% is nothing to sneeze at, interest-wise.
But, to me it seems like too much hassle, and I absolutely HATE haggling, which is a lot of what this is (calling the cards and asking for higher limits, to waive the BT fees, etc.). Also, as a stay-at-home dad with a personal income of <10K/yr, I suspect I wouldn't get enough credit to make it worth my while.
If anyone else wants to try it, though, let me know how it goes! There is no shortage of websites to tell you how to do it.
1) Apply for several dozen credit cards all at once, picking ones with good bonuses and cashback, and most importantly including several that have 0% Balance Transfer for 12 mos. (and ideally very little transfer fee).
2) When all the cards come in, take out as much as you can in Balance Transfers from the 0% cards.
3) Take this money and put it in a 5% or 6% savings account for 11 months, then pay the cards back and keep the interest.
Obviously there are a lot more details, and while not illegal, this is certainly not encouraged by the CC companies, so you have to pay close attention to minimum monthly payments and other letter-of-the-law stuff. But if you're willing to put up with all the hassle and CSR-wrangling, and you're willing to have your credit score go down the crapper for a few months (it eventually comes back), you can actually make pretty good money -- $50K at 5.5% is nothing to sneeze at, interest-wise.
But, to me it seems like too much hassle, and I absolutely HATE haggling, which is a lot of what this is (calling the cards and asking for higher limits, to waive the BT fees, etc.). Also, as a stay-at-home dad with a personal income of <10K/yr, I suspect I wouldn't get enough credit to make it worth my while.
If anyone else wants to try it, though, let me know how it goes! There is no shortage of websites to tell you how to do it.


Comments
It seems more trouble than it's worth to me too.
Can you apply in Liz's name to take advantage of her good credit?
If nothing else, after reading all this, I think I will at least start doing more spending via credit card to take advantage of cashback and bonus programs. I used to think they were more trouble than they were worth, but it IS basically free money for nothing more than the effort of making a couple credit card payments instead of having the money come directly out of the debit acount.
I've been using Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards card for years. It's been fairly successful --- basically, we get what feels almost like unlimited gift certificates to Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. I think they've recently made their points ratios a bit worse, which sucks, but on the other hand we haven't managed to use up the last batch of certificates.
I'm getting ready to switch to a Fidelity MySmartCash account. This looks like an awesome program, especially if you already use Fido: IIRC, you get a "debit card" account that pays about 3.5% interest, gives you 1.5% cash back on everything, and refunds all ATM fees, and it's easy to transfer money to/from a money market account, which pays 5%.