Balance Transfer Arbitrage

Not everyone can get a 0% APR balance transfer, it’s a fact of life. If your credit isn’t stellar or you have too much credit already, credit card companies may not be willing to extend to you any of that juicy 0% offer because, frankly, you’re too risky. They know that no one else will offer you a 0% balance transfer so they aren’t going to either, but they will offer you something that’s a little worse than 0% - like 7.99%. 7.99% is great if you’re goal is to reduce the interest rate of your loans, it’s awful if you’re trying to find a 0% arbitrage funding source because you can’t get 7.99% guaranteed from anywhere.

So, what should you do? Improve your credit. Research online to see what you can do to improve your credit because that’s the only way the credit card companies are going to give you any decent offers. They aren’t in the business of giving credit to anyone and everyone, they want to give it to people they can trust to pay it back and people they can earn money from - you want to be extended credit because you’re in category 1 (trust).

Some quick tips for improving your credit are to reduce your utilization (how much of your total credit limit you currently owe), make your payments on time, and simply wait. There are other ways to improve it but ultimately those ones are the main ingredients. Sometimes you don’t have enough history, sometimes you are borrowing too much, sometimes it’s something else - all of it improves with time as long as you keep paying.