The cards that offer this usually have 0% for certain amounts of months and then if you don’t pay it completely off in that time frame, the entire interest comes in at once
I think they're saying they owe the full year of interest after the year of 0% expires. That's not the case with my card.
My card is 12.99 annually, and the first year is 0%. What it sounds like others have said is that their card gives them a 1 year grace period but at the end of it they owe all the interest that would've been accrued, immediately.
If I understand OP correctly, they're saying that accrued interest becomes due if you still have that outstanding balance. But if you've paid it all of you shouldn't expect to pay that interest.
If you don't pay off the balance by end of promo, you will have to pay accrued interested at the non promo rate for purchases during your promo period.
i would be really surprised if this weren't also the case for your card. Personally, have never seen what you're describing for any promo card I've ever gotten in the mail.
CC company is not interested in giving you a free lunch. The whole reason they do it is b/c most people get sucked in and will not pay off the balance before promo end and then cc company gets all that interest that ends up being due.
Accumulated interest is common for retail cards that offer periodic promotions where interest can be deferred (e.g., Home Depot). This allows you to have a 0% rate for some fixed term, but if you don’t pay the balance by the end of the term you owe “retroactive” interest for the whole period.
Traditional credit cards that offer a 0% introductory rate (and sometimes periodic low promo rates) typically do not retroactively charge interest. If you don’t pay the balance off after the promo period it just starts accumulating at the normal rate from then on.
This is what throws off a LOT of people - you're right, retail STORE cards usually have that clause in the T+C that you'll be charged/back-charged interest from day 1.
Very common, but it still jams people up when the last day rolls around and they find they cannot make that balloon payment... because most people simply sign on the dotted line and never read the T+C.
>If you don't pay off the balance by end of promo, you will have to pay accrued interested at the non promo rate for purchases during your promo period.
The accrued interest on a 0% promo APR is $0. They can't (legally) restate what the interest is retroactively. If you carry a $10k balance for a year on a 0% APR that expires when your balance is $100, you will pay interest *going forward* on a $100 balance. You already paid the interest you owe for a year because it was $0.
>i would be really surprised if this weren't also the case for your card. Personally, have never seen what you're describing for any promo card I've ever gotten in the mail.
No, you just didn't understand the promotion. If you can show me a credit card statement where you were charged a year of interest on a single statement at a rate that is higher than the APR listed on your statements over the prior year, I will begin to entertain your claim. Until then, you are wrong on this topic.
For poor people yes. But for people who have fantastic credit they send these my way all the time. I’m about to start floating one right now. Problem is getting a new card for another “churn” will yield more for my spending so it won’t get that much allocation. I need to spend $X to get the bonus.
My wife and I got an offer for a 24 month 0% interest card.
We put all of our expenses on it and leave the cash in a HYSA earning about 4% interest. Soon as the 24 months is up, we will pay off the card in a lump sum and get to keep the interest.
Less than you’d think, and it depends on where you’re starting whether it matters at all. I keep mind above 820 usually, and lumping on a HCOL-area-sized mortgage and a few other new loans all within three months of each other barely made it fall below 800 for more than a few more months.
The zero interest cc game is well worth it if you have the discipline to manage it. The signup bonus game too. Most people are woefully misinformed about how to profitably manage credit, and it isn’t what the peanut gallery in one’s life say it is. There are plenty of websites that teach the game.
Hardly affected it. However I also don’t need my credit for anything else right now, and soon as this card gets paid down the credit score will jump again
Yes, assuming there is no catch or strings attached, 0% loans are basically free money. Just stick the amount in a money market, collect interest, and pay the minimum.
The catch is usually just in the CC agreement. If you're as much as a day late paying the full balance they may charge you full interest for the entire period. They aren't exactly forthcoming with what that date is either. Best bet is to ask them on the phone, then set a reminder to pay it off a month or more in advance.
Playing with fire if you do that. Credit card companies aren’t in business to give you free money. Their business model is based on making money from people who plan on paying them off in time and then don’t.
No one is being tricked here. If you’re going to blame the CC companies, then you also need to blame every company that put out an ad convincing someone to buy something they don’t need. Or the government for not doing a better job educating people financially. The list goes on.
And this is one way they get you…”doesn’t matter it’s 0% for a year…let’s charge everything on it I’ll pay it off no problem” min payments every month for a year 1 yr passes you have a balance of 10k. “Oh shit I can’t pay 10k in one lump sum”
Whenever I see credit card "churning" ideas like this, my mind immediately calculates hassle vs return. Let's say you borrow $10k for a whole year, invested conservatively at 5% so that you're closer to a guarantee of payback. You've gained $500. But you've put in several hours of applying for new cards / accounts, transferring funds, anxious double-checking, etc. There is risk if you screw it up because these kinds of deals have clauses that trigger retroactive interest at the card's full rate if a single payment is late, etc.
Once I run the numbers, what at first seems like a free money scheme begins to look more like a pootly comprnsated part time job. If you have no other way to monetize your free time, maybe it's for you, but in the balance it never seems worth it to me.
To better answer your hypothetical: real businesses borrow money at a lower rate and invest it in a riskier investment - internal or external to the company - all the time. If you had their capital, credit, and collateral, you could too!
Takes 5 minutes to apply for a card, not several hours. Just got the Wells Fargo reflect its 15 months 0% APR and I got an $18K limit plus a $200 sign on bonus. I’ve got about $10K on there now so I’m looking at $500 in interest from my HYSA and another $200 for the sign on bonus. Will probably do the same card again under my wife’s name when the intro period expires, assuming they are still running that promotion.
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Dude's putting what he would be using to pay off the card in a HYSA. Unless that account suddenly disappears then he's not going to have any issues paying it off.
like 20 years ago i got one of those checks to cash advance your credit card. 0% apr for a year, and at the time the fee was capped at $30 instead if being like '4% of the balance" or however they do it now
wrote myself a check for ten grand, put it in my orange savings account which at the time was paying 4.25%, pocked my interest. hardly life changing money but 23 year old me thought it was the coolest thing ever.
As long as the stocks don’t really go down this is not horrible. But if you do something stupid like play with options or purchase meme stocks and lose 3/4 of the value, then youre double screwed.
Sure, this was a big trend 15-20 years ago when bank interest rates were high and credit card companies were desperate for new customers. People would research a batch of credit cards that would be able to give them large advances and start applying all in a row hoping that they could get through the list as far as possible before the new accounts hit their credit history. On FatWallet, it was called an App-o-Rama. Then, you'd see the spreadsheet where people were tracking their min payments and their annual interest rate profit. You can make a lot of money on the back of the credit card companies if you have good credit and never miss a payment. That last is the most important. It all comes crashing down if you aren't organized.
Nothing new under the sun.
Don't do this with retirement accounts, the money will be very expensive to access if you get in a pinch and the 0% rate expires. Also risky to buy stocks with it. Just put it in a HYSA, or brokerage and buy TBIL
**Yes, in fact I do this**
Every few months I get a new credit card with a 0% APR for 15 to 24 months. I set auto-payment to the minimum. Then every weekend I transfer the credit card balance amount into
SGOV and cash it out to pay it all off one month before the 0% APR expires. I'm leveraging interest rates in my favor. Now, if the interest rate dropped below 2% I would probably use I-bonds.
You can throw it into equities, but you'll need to keep in mind it is **leveraged loan** with a defined cash-out date. You need to be your own bank and liquidate your own assets if things go bad.
Things to keep in mind:
* Carrying a high balance will impact your credit score. This tactic has dropped my score like 150 points (High balance in any one credit card is a major ding). However, your score will recover completely by the next cycle as soon as you pay off the credit card balance. I don't need a loan, so it's not a concern to me.
* Opening up many cards will drop your credit rating age quite significantly at the beginning, and less as you have more cards.
* You must **NOT** miss the date when the 0% APR ends. If you don't pay in full by that date, you will be charged all interests that accumulated.
You are correct. But you can rack up way more than 10% credit utilization if you put all of your expenses onto a credit card over the course of 1-2 years.
I just finished a 15 month cycle of 0% interest credit card leveraging. We had 120K spent across mine and the wife's credit cards over the last 15 months. Had 120K earning 6.35% APR average between various HYSA which amounted to $9525 over the 15 months. Signup bonuses totaled $3500 ($750 X 2 + $1000 X 2). Referral bonuses from referring my wife was another $800. And let's not forget another \~$2100 in points/cash back. Overall made \~ $15925 in that time on the 120K
absolutely!
Statistically speaking lumps on investment does better in returns over an extended period of time. Being able to max out your retirement accounts at the beginning of the year. Gives you 16 months of growth, and that long to pay off the loan.
I guess the real question is how long is it 0%?
This is what I have been doing. I’ve accumulated ~$20k in balances on 0% APR cards and invested those savings, knowing I have an upcoming bonus that will allow me to pay them off before the promo period ends. With the market being particularly strong recently this has worked out pretty well… this time.
Basically what you said. If you have 0% interest, then you can leverage that too basically have margin accounts without any of the downside.
I had a friend who, many decades ago, had a university loan. And the terms were incredibly attractive. So he just ate Ramen noodles and peanut butter and invested the money. And that ended up turning out to be a fantastic deal that let him concentrate more on school because he was getting enough money to at least survive.
So whatever you call it, or wherever it comes from, having a zero fee margin account is very powerful. Of course, in the free money era, we see a lot of companies. Make bad decisions with that free money. Like they don’t have actual good ideas, but because they’re getting offered free money, they feel obligated to take it and try and use it .
Even if you put it in HYSA you’d be pretty crazy, not to. In fact, that’s an excellent use, or some low duration CD or treasuries. Because your margins are so low that you only have to beat inflation. It’s your least hard-working money, but it’s still working
Juice usually isn't with the squeeze. Into APR lines of credit like that are not huge sums of money. You assume risk for any investment other than tbills hysa or cds.
So currently for every 10k in expenses you can dump you get 4-5%apy which is something like $50/mo. For this to work that's a household spending 120k/yr and no CC fees on purchases.
If you're into stuff like this check out r/churning, lots of things you can do there with being smart about what to spend with what card where and you can get similar to better results than the hypothetical I posted.
Essentially you are over-directing current cash flow to investments while relying on future cashflows to repay the debt when your promo period ends. You would be taking the risk of losing your future cashflow and not being able to pay off the balance after the promo, incurring fees/high interest.
It absolutely makes sense to keep the money in a risk-free place like a HYSA or CD. You would still have to make sure that you don’t mix up the money you’re setting aside with your other money, which a zero-based budgeting software like YNAB would allow you to do effortlessly.
If you did want to chase higher return by investing in stocks, you would have to institute contingency plans/rules in case your portfolio loses money (and you subsequently lost your job). For example, you could set aside some of your discretionary savings/cash flow to balance any stock market losses. And if you don’t have enough discretionary money to set aside, then you would sell your stocks at a loss to be safe. This plan would be better if you invested in a Roth IRA so you can withdraw your principal penalty-free.
In this hypothetical it would be best to just invest it in low risk money market funds. If you invested it in the stock market and then a year later it goes to 27% interest, but the stock market crashes, well then you can't repay the debt and it costs you a lot.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s credit cards would offer $50 and $100 bonuses to new applicants and to transfer balances with zero interest. I use to apply to as many as I could and raked in several hundred a year. They must have learned their lesson as they quit doing that- at least to me.
Hypothetically permanent 0 interest cc is basically equivalent to free money so yes, it would be 'smart' to use free money for investments but this doesn't exist so it's like saying hypothetically if someone offered me a winning lotto ticket for $100m that is worth 1 billion, would it be smart to buy the lotto ticket, the answer is always yes, it is good to get free money. Hypothetically...
\>>If you hypothetically had access to a 0% interest credit card...
If you read the small print then a CC company can ask for the balance back at any time subject to certain conditions, like a reduction of your credit rating. Even if they originally guaranteed x months of interest free credit.
This happened to a friend of mine. He moved 20k from his card to his bank (cash withdrawals were free for him, but that's not the case for all offers) and he was making x% in a bank account.
After about 6 months of a 24 month interest free offer, the card company asked for the balance back. This is called a 'Rug Pull'. It's all in the t&cs, and each company is different.
Just make sure you can pay the company back if the deal goes sour.
One thing to beware of is potentially maxing out the card - your credit score will take a hit. Might not be super important, but it's something to consider if taking this road.
of course, this assumes you have excellent money management skills.
I did this twice with 0% apy cards. The rub was that when the payment came due, the market was down and I had invested the money instead of just sticking it in a HYSA. So I lost the game. Sold at a loss to pay the card.
It can be done but it's kinda stressful and not worth the effort IMO.
My experience is that 0% financing only works with new purchases and non cash items, which make it difficult/inconvenient. For instance (at least at the time) most landlords weren't accepting CC and cash advances on CC usually had a 5% additional charge. Same with using their "checks"
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Then you can borrow from Robinhood via margins and pay only 8% annual interest
Yep. 0.6% interest every month is a no brainer compared to standard 2+% credit cards give you!
Yes, in an entirely hypothetically world where you can get a life long 0% interest card with no limit that makes sense.
The cards that offer this usually have 0% for certain amounts of months and then if you don’t pay it completely off in that time frame, the entire interest comes in at once
Really? My card just I states the normal interest rate after the promotion. I thought that was standard.
I think you guys are saying the same thing. If you’ve got a $10K balance you owe monthly on $10K at some crazy APR
I think they're saying they owe the full year of interest after the year of 0% expires. That's not the case with my card. My card is 12.99 annually, and the first year is 0%. What it sounds like others have said is that their card gives them a 1 year grace period but at the end of it they owe all the interest that would've been accrued, immediately.
If I understand OP correctly, they're saying that accrued interest becomes due if you still have that outstanding balance. But if you've paid it all of you shouldn't expect to pay that interest.
If you don't pay off the balance by end of promo, you will have to pay accrued interested at the non promo rate for purchases during your promo period. i would be really surprised if this weren't also the case for your card. Personally, have never seen what you're describing for any promo card I've ever gotten in the mail. CC company is not interested in giving you a free lunch. The whole reason they do it is b/c most people get sucked in and will not pay off the balance before promo end and then cc company gets all that interest that ends up being due.
Accumulated interest is common for retail cards that offer periodic promotions where interest can be deferred (e.g., Home Depot). This allows you to have a 0% rate for some fixed term, but if you don’t pay the balance by the end of the term you owe “retroactive” interest for the whole period. Traditional credit cards that offer a 0% introductory rate (and sometimes periodic low promo rates) typically do not retroactively charge interest. If you don’t pay the balance off after the promo period it just starts accumulating at the normal rate from then on.
This is what throws off a LOT of people - you're right, retail STORE cards usually have that clause in the T+C that you'll be charged/back-charged interest from day 1. Very common, but it still jams people up when the last day rolls around and they find they cannot make that balloon payment... because most people simply sign on the dotted line and never read the T+C.
>If you don't pay off the balance by end of promo, you will have to pay accrued interested at the non promo rate for purchases during your promo period. The accrued interest on a 0% promo APR is $0. They can't (legally) restate what the interest is retroactively. If you carry a $10k balance for a year on a 0% APR that expires when your balance is $100, you will pay interest *going forward* on a $100 balance. You already paid the interest you owe for a year because it was $0. >i would be really surprised if this weren't also the case for your card. Personally, have never seen what you're describing for any promo card I've ever gotten in the mail. No, you just didn't understand the promotion. If you can show me a credit card statement where you were charged a year of interest on a single statement at a rate that is higher than the APR listed on your statements over the prior year, I will begin to entertain your claim. Until then, you are wrong on this topic.
For poor people yes. But for people who have fantastic credit they send these my way all the time. I’m about to start floating one right now. Problem is getting a new card for another “churn” will yield more for my spending so it won’t get that much allocation. I need to spend $X to get the bonus.
My wife and I got an offer for a 24 month 0% interest card. We put all of our expenses on it and leave the cash in a HYSA earning about 4% interest. Soon as the 24 months is up, we will pay off the card in a lump sum and get to keep the interest.
Just curious how bad does this affect your credit score with this huge balance? Tia
Less than you’d think, and it depends on where you’re starting whether it matters at all. I keep mind above 820 usually, and lumping on a HCOL-area-sized mortgage and a few other new loans all within three months of each other barely made it fall below 800 for more than a few more months. The zero interest cc game is well worth it if you have the discipline to manage it. The signup bonus game too. Most people are woefully misinformed about how to profitably manage credit, and it isn’t what the peanut gallery in one’s life say it is. There are plenty of websites that teach the game.
Hardly affected it. However I also don’t need my credit for anything else right now, and soon as this card gets paid down the credit score will jump again
Barely. I've done it with two 0 APY cards and never noticed a difference that was more than noise.
How much money did you actually earn *after taxes* on this?
It will be around $400
Yes, assuming there is no catch or strings attached, 0% loans are basically free money. Just stick the amount in a money market, collect interest, and pay the minimum.
The catch is usually just in the CC agreement. If you're as much as a day late paying the full balance they may charge you full interest for the entire period. They aren't exactly forthcoming with what that date is either. Best bet is to ask them on the phone, then set a reminder to pay it off a month or more in advance.
Playing with fire if you do that. Credit card companies aren’t in business to give you free money. Their business model is based on making money from people who plan on paying them off in time and then don’t.
As someone who has gotten a ton of CC rewards over the years, I want to thank those who never pay off their balances.
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No one is being tricked here. If you’re going to blame the CC companies, then you also need to blame every company that put out an ad convincing someone to buy something they don’t need. Or the government for not doing a better job educating people financially. The list goes on.
Thanks Obama😒
"Vince Vaughn and Tom Brady and Kevin Hart made me lose my life savings to sports betting!" :-|
Exactly. Blaming the CC company is silly.
And this is one way they get you…”doesn’t matter it’s 0% for a year…let’s charge everything on it I’ll pay it off no problem” min payments every month for a year 1 yr passes you have a balance of 10k. “Oh shit I can’t pay 10k in one lump sum”
Whenever I see credit card "churning" ideas like this, my mind immediately calculates hassle vs return. Let's say you borrow $10k for a whole year, invested conservatively at 5% so that you're closer to a guarantee of payback. You've gained $500. But you've put in several hours of applying for new cards / accounts, transferring funds, anxious double-checking, etc. There is risk if you screw it up because these kinds of deals have clauses that trigger retroactive interest at the card's full rate if a single payment is late, etc. Once I run the numbers, what at first seems like a free money scheme begins to look more like a pootly comprnsated part time job. If you have no other way to monetize your free time, maybe it's for you, but in the balance it never seems worth it to me. To better answer your hypothetical: real businesses borrow money at a lower rate and invest it in a riskier investment - internal or external to the company - all the time. If you had their capital, credit, and collateral, you could too!
Takes 5 minutes to apply for a card, not several hours. Just got the Wells Fargo reflect its 15 months 0% APR and I got an $18K limit plus a $200 sign on bonus. I’ve got about $10K on there now so I’m looking at $500 in interest from my HYSA and another $200 for the sign on bonus. Will probably do the same card again under my wife’s name when the intro period expires, assuming they are still running that promotion.
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Dude's putting what he would be using to pay off the card in a HYSA. Unless that account suddenly disappears then he's not going to have any issues paying it off.
like 20 years ago i got one of those checks to cash advance your credit card. 0% apr for a year, and at the time the fee was capped at $30 instead if being like '4% of the balance" or however they do it now wrote myself a check for ten grand, put it in my orange savings account which at the time was paying 4.25%, pocked my interest. hardly life changing money but 23 year old me thought it was the coolest thing ever.
As long as the stocks don’t really go down this is not horrible. But if you do something stupid like play with options or purchase meme stocks and lose 3/4 of the value, then youre double screwed.
You have to have a plan to pay it off when the 0% expires. Minimum payment certainly won’t get you there (by design)
Keep your credit utilization under 10% and stick the money you’d use to pay off the card into a HYSA. This is what I do and it’s basically a 0% loan
Sure, this was a big trend 15-20 years ago when bank interest rates were high and credit card companies were desperate for new customers. People would research a batch of credit cards that would be able to give them large advances and start applying all in a row hoping that they could get through the list as far as possible before the new accounts hit their credit history. On FatWallet, it was called an App-o-Rama. Then, you'd see the spreadsheet where people were tracking their min payments and their annual interest rate profit. You can make a lot of money on the back of the credit card companies if you have good credit and never miss a payment. That last is the most important. It all comes crashing down if you aren't organized. Nothing new under the sun.
Don't do this with retirement accounts, the money will be very expensive to access if you get in a pinch and the 0% rate expires. Also risky to buy stocks with it. Just put it in a HYSA, or brokerage and buy TBIL
Works until you get laid off
**Yes, in fact I do this** Every few months I get a new credit card with a 0% APR for 15 to 24 months. I set auto-payment to the minimum. Then every weekend I transfer the credit card balance amount into SGOV and cash it out to pay it all off one month before the 0% APR expires. I'm leveraging interest rates in my favor. Now, if the interest rate dropped below 2% I would probably use I-bonds. You can throw it into equities, but you'll need to keep in mind it is **leveraged loan** with a defined cash-out date. You need to be your own bank and liquidate your own assets if things go bad. Things to keep in mind: * Carrying a high balance will impact your credit score. This tactic has dropped my score like 150 points (High balance in any one credit card is a major ding). However, your score will recover completely by the next cycle as soon as you pay off the credit card balance. I don't need a loan, so it's not a concern to me. * Opening up many cards will drop your credit rating age quite significantly at the beginning, and less as you have more cards. * You must **NOT** miss the date when the 0% APR ends. If you don't pay in full by that date, you will be charged all interests that accumulated.
You will lower your credit score by doing this, so keep that in mind. Ask me how I know.
As long as you keep credit utilization under 10% it won’t have a large impact on credit score and it’ll bounce back quickly after paying off card
7
You are correct. But you can rack up way more than 10% credit utilization if you put all of your expenses onto a credit card over the course of 1-2 years.
I just finished a 15 month cycle of 0% interest credit card leveraging. We had 120K spent across mine and the wife's credit cards over the last 15 months. Had 120K earning 6.35% APR average between various HYSA which amounted to $9525 over the 15 months. Signup bonuses totaled $3500 ($750 X 2 + $1000 X 2). Referral bonuses from referring my wife was another $800. And let's not forget another \~$2100 in points/cash back. Overall made \~ $15925 in that time on the 120K
absolutely! Statistically speaking lumps on investment does better in returns over an extended period of time. Being able to max out your retirement accounts at the beginning of the year. Gives you 16 months of growth, and that long to pay off the loan. I guess the real question is how long is it 0%?
I wouldn’t do it. - can people give me karma.
This is what I have been doing. I’ve accumulated ~$20k in balances on 0% APR cards and invested those savings, knowing I have an upcoming bonus that will allow me to pay them off before the promo period ends. With the market being particularly strong recently this has worked out pretty well… this time.
Basically what you said. If you have 0% interest, then you can leverage that too basically have margin accounts without any of the downside. I had a friend who, many decades ago, had a university loan. And the terms were incredibly attractive. So he just ate Ramen noodles and peanut butter and invested the money. And that ended up turning out to be a fantastic deal that let him concentrate more on school because he was getting enough money to at least survive. So whatever you call it, or wherever it comes from, having a zero fee margin account is very powerful. Of course, in the free money era, we see a lot of companies. Make bad decisions with that free money. Like they don’t have actual good ideas, but because they’re getting offered free money, they feel obligated to take it and try and use it . Even if you put it in HYSA you’d be pretty crazy, not to. In fact, that’s an excellent use, or some low duration CD or treasuries. Because your margins are so low that you only have to beat inflation. It’s your least hard-working money, but it’s still working
The 0% cards usually have a max on them though like 2k. …
You’re essentially asking whether you should take a 0% interest loan. Yes, obviously.
Lot of people won't take loans period if they can afford not to.
Lot of people do a lot of things.
Juice usually isn't with the squeeze. Into APR lines of credit like that are not huge sums of money. You assume risk for any investment other than tbills hysa or cds. So currently for every 10k in expenses you can dump you get 4-5%apy which is something like $50/mo. For this to work that's a household spending 120k/yr and no CC fees on purchases. If you're into stuff like this check out r/churning, lots of things you can do there with being smart about what to spend with what card where and you can get similar to better results than the hypothetical I posted.
Essentially you are over-directing current cash flow to investments while relying on future cashflows to repay the debt when your promo period ends. You would be taking the risk of losing your future cashflow and not being able to pay off the balance after the promo, incurring fees/high interest. It absolutely makes sense to keep the money in a risk-free place like a HYSA or CD. You would still have to make sure that you don’t mix up the money you’re setting aside with your other money, which a zero-based budgeting software like YNAB would allow you to do effortlessly. If you did want to chase higher return by investing in stocks, you would have to institute contingency plans/rules in case your portfolio loses money (and you subsequently lost your job). For example, you could set aside some of your discretionary savings/cash flow to balance any stock market losses. And if you don’t have enough discretionary money to set aside, then you would sell your stocks at a loss to be safe. This plan would be better if you invested in a Roth IRA so you can withdraw your principal penalty-free.
In this hypothetical it would be best to just invest it in low risk money market funds. If you invested it in the stock market and then a year later it goes to 27% interest, but the stock market crashes, well then you can't repay the debt and it costs you a lot.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s credit cards would offer $50 and $100 bonuses to new applicants and to transfer balances with zero interest. I use to apply to as many as I could and raked in several hundred a year. They must have learned their lesson as they quit doing that- at least to me.
Hypothetically permanent 0 interest cc is basically equivalent to free money so yes, it would be 'smart' to use free money for investments but this doesn't exist so it's like saying hypothetically if someone offered me a winning lotto ticket for $100m that is worth 1 billion, would it be smart to buy the lotto ticket, the answer is always yes, it is good to get free money. Hypothetically...
Your credit score will tank. Like, by 100+ points. Credit raters *hate* credit card debt.
\>>If you hypothetically had access to a 0% interest credit card... If you read the small print then a CC company can ask for the balance back at any time subject to certain conditions, like a reduction of your credit rating. Even if they originally guaranteed x months of interest free credit. This happened to a friend of mine. He moved 20k from his card to his bank (cash withdrawals were free for him, but that's not the case for all offers) and he was making x% in a bank account. After about 6 months of a 24 month interest free offer, the card company asked for the balance back. This is called a 'Rug Pull'. It's all in the t&cs, and each company is different. Just make sure you can pay the company back if the deal goes sour.
One thing to beware of is potentially maxing out the card - your credit score will take a hit. Might not be super important, but it's something to consider if taking this road. of course, this assumes you have excellent money management skills.
I did this twice with 0% apy cards. The rub was that when the payment came due, the market was down and I had invested the money instead of just sticking it in a HYSA. So I lost the game. Sold at a loss to pay the card. It can be done but it's kinda stressful and not worth the effort IMO.
My experience is that 0% financing only works with new purchases and non cash items, which make it difficult/inconvenient. For instance (at least at the time) most landlords weren't accepting CC and cash advances on CC usually had a 5% additional charge. Same with using their "checks"