I am sure this has been talked about countless times, I was just unable to find a post when I searched.

I have a few 0% cc checks that I am thinking about cashing & putting the money in my ING account until the low rate ends. I was thinking $12,000 to start. My fico score is good, and I will not be needing a loan or a mortgage anytime soon. What is the interest that would be earned on $12k at 4.4% until April 07? Is it even worth it?

Do you think this is a reasonable idea? And why or why not?

Thanks in advance and I thank you for the advice.

The interest from Oct-Apr on 12k would be about $260, but obviously you'd have to keep up min payments on the CCs... so if you're planning to use part of the 12k for that, you'd miss out on a bit of interest.

And don't forget that you'll owe taxes on the interest earned.

So its probably is not worth the effort of babysitting the account.

It is a reasonable idea if, 1. You can stop yourself from spending money from the balance transfer, 2. You are the type of person that is NEVER late on paying your bills, 3. You have no foreseeable reason to need a decent credit score before your transfers run out. You should probably go for deals that are 12 - 15 months instead of only 6 months, unless they are not available to you. For me, it has been worth spending a few minutes monthly making payments to take in over a few thousand dollars. Unfortunately, these deals are going to come to a halt pretty soon on existing CC accounts as Chase, Citi, BofA/MBNA are all going with no limits to balance transfer fees.