Can You Use Your Credit Card to Make Money?

Most of the time you read about how evil credit cards are and how expensive it is to pay interest on credit card purchases. Is it possible to use a credit card to actually make money rather than spend it? Here are two ways to look at credit cards differently, and consider them as a tool to making money:

Balance Transfer Offers to Pay Off High Interest Debt

If you have high interest debts, you really need to pay it off before you start looking for ways to make money on your savings or investments. If you’re paying 15-20nterest on credit card debt and earning even an impressive 70n your investments, you’re still losing money in the long run. High interest debts need to be paid off before you can really earn a return on your investments because the interest you’re paying is eating any of the returns you receive from your savings and investments.

If you are eligible for a credit card with a 0PR balance transfer offer, use it to pay down credit cards. Make sure you pay your balance in full during the 0PR promotional period to save the most interest. Money you save on interest payments is almost the same as earning money it is money back in your pocket! With our current economy, none of your investments are likely to make as much as you’re paying in interest on a credit card or high interest loan, so you are much better off reducing the interest you pay by eliminating your debts.

Borrowing Money to Make Money

If you do not have any high interest debts, you might be interested in using a credit card to make money. People have used 0PR credit cards to borrow interest-free money for twelve to eighteen months and deposit it into an interest-bearing, FDIC insured account. You look for 0PR balance transfer offers with low or no balance transfer fees, and then use the balance transfer checks to deposit the money into your bank account.

Some credit cards do not allow you to write a balance transfer check to yourself, but you can get around that by having the available credit on your 0PR card transferred to a second credit card that doesn’t have a balance on it and then requesting the credit balance from the credit card companies as a refund check.

Years ago, there were high interest savings accounts and certificates of deposits earning around interest which gave you a much better return on the borrowed money, but sadly, these days you will be lucky to find an option earning higher than 1.25/p>

If you borrowed $10,000 from an interest-free source for 12 months and earned 1.25nterest in a deposit account, you would make about $125. While this is $125 of free money to you it hardly seems worth the effort and potential risks of making a mistake that could end up costing you money. This method of using credit cards to make money may make more sense if you find an option for earning higher interest on your money.

Debbie Dragon provides content for CardGuys.com, a site offering unbiased credit card news and information about related financial products and services.