I have two friends that did this to get rid of mortgages. One guy only had about $80K left on his mortgage. Not sure about the other one. I think it would be tough to do for over $80-100K or so. $25K is trivial.

The max I had floating using this method was around $40K. I did it for about a year just for fun, and to see if it would work. It was very easy to do, but I don't carry any debt like this at the moment.

As soon as I have some equity I plan on doing this.

Capital One gives unsecured loans at 6.99% fixed. I also like the zero interest methods. I didn't get a home equity loan, I just kept tranferring the balances to different credit cards. It's getting harder to find cards that don't charge a 3% transfer charge. One of my credit cards offered me 0 percent for 6 months with a 3% transfer charge, but I called and counter offered. I was able to pay 1.99% for 12 months with no balance transfer fee. Not zero, but still good.

As a side note, it's not a good idea to transfer simple interest loans that you've had for a while. The bulk of the interest is paid at the beginning of the loan.

Just tried this with a $5,000 line of credit from my bank and Discover card and it worked. I could have done more but just wanted to keep it low on my first go around.

Also, make sure that your bank doesn't charge any penalties for repayment of loans early.

Wouldn't a variant of the idea be that you put the money in 12 month CD at say 7%?

That way you are making 7% off of money you essentially got for free

the power of positive arbitrage

Absolutely. You could make a few extra thousand from home each year just by doing a little shuffling.

OK, I fully expect to see you on some middle-of-the-night infomercial with babes in bikinis at a swimming pool in the background as you tout your new foolproof money-making scheme. You'll offer tapes and seminars at local Red Roof Inns as you make your way across middle American like some snake oil salesman.

Oh Homeboy, you've stooped so low.

LOL. As I was typing that, I thought the same thing.

Makes we wonder could someone make 75k a year doing this?

It would take loans of 1.5 million lets say you would have to get 31 cards (one not use to send balance transfers) of credit worth 50k a piece...

After you weather the storm for a couple of years you could make a nice little living