prosperityseeker

Today I visited an online forum and there was this guy on there advising people to make extra cash by using their credit cards. As you know, I was very interested in hearing what this fruitcake had to say and I have to be honest with you, it was not only ludicrous but just plain crazy advice. And the bad thing is that people were actually writing and commenting on “what a brilliant idea.” Now, I don’t know if they were just kidding, but to me, they had to be absolute lunatics.

Here’s his brilliant plan ( in a nutshell). He basically signs up for a bunch of credit cards offers and then takes advantage of the free offers. For instance, he might receive free gas, store gift cards, frequent flier miles or even a percentage of the purchase amount, whatever. He then sells the free gas, store credit cards, frequent flier miles, to someone else and makes “instant cash” for a few minutes of work. According to him, this is a great way to make some extra holiday money and he strongly advises you to do the same.

Here’s my thought about this plan.

• It sucks big time. It is never a good idea to rack up credit card debt to get extra cash. Not only will you end up losing money when you can’t pay the balance off, you’ll be bombarded with excessive interest rates on not only these new cards but your old ones too which could cost you thousands of dollars.

• By applying for so much credit, your credit report is going to get shot and your debt-to-income ratio is going to go up, every time your rack up credit. Then, when you need credit, you aren’t going to be able to get it.

• By having all this credit is just bad news. Its too tempting to charge it up and live stupidly when you have so many open credit lines.

My final advice….DO NOT DO IT. This guy would be better off getting a part time job so that he could make some extra cash shoveling snow, pet sitting or something like that.

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