How to Play the Balance Transfer Game (Credit Cards)

For years and years smart Americans who are laden with too much credit card debt have successfully played the balance transfer game. This entails pulling one or more balances from a credit card and transferring them over to another. While this game can go on seemingly forever, there are ways to play it and win. Here is how.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• 3 or more credit cards
• Time
• Researching skills
• Decent credit rating
• All credit card accounts current and in good standing
• 50% or more in open current credit lines

How to Play the Balance Transfer Game (Credit Cards)

1. Research your cards and their incentives. Most cards will easily let you do this from their website. What you are looking for is the best balance transfer offer, the one that has the lowest interest rate, and preferably no balance transfer fees of any kind, or very low fees.
2. Identify which card is the best to pull the balances from. Now look at your balances, what you want to do is take the balances from one card, preferably the one that has the highest balance, and transfer it to your other 2-3 cards, preferably 3.
3. Transfer the balances. Now what you want to do is divide the main balance of the primary card you will be transferring into 2-3 even amounts. Next transfer those even amounts to your remaining 2-3 cards in even increments. This will completely zero out your balance on the primary card and up your balances on the other cards.
4. Wait 60 days and apply for a credit line increase on the zero-balance card. Let the credit card company see a zero balance (which they do not make any money on) for at least 60-91 days on the empty card, as you pay more than the minimum payment due on the other 2-3 cards that you transferred the balance to. Then call them (the zero-balance credit card company) and ask for a line increase and an interest rate deduction. They will typically reduce the interest a point or two and increase your line by up to 50% to garner more business from you.
5. Wait 60 more days and transfer the original balance plus some into the empty card. Give your other cards about two months to season, and your now lower interest, high-limit empty card time to get more offers. As the credit card company sees your account lie dormant they will send you all sorts of offers and checks, hold on to these. When the time comes transfer back the balances you originally transferred to the 2-3 cards, plus any additional moneys you wish to free up, not allowing this empty card to reach more than 50% of the limit.

Tips & Warnings

• Repeat as often as you like. As long as you are careful you can keep playing the balance transfer game successfully. Just always watch that you are not increasing any of the balances.