Investing August 21, 2025 0 Comments

The Shocking Money Hack Wall Street Won’t Tell You: Borrow to Save and Watch Your Wealth Explode

Ever been given that classic piece of advice from your mom: “Never get into debt, never gamble”? Yeah, me too. But here’s a twist for ya—I figured out how to not just break those rules, but profit from them. Sounds nuts, right? Yet today, I’m playing the game smarter. I’m carrying debt, sure—but on my own terms. Instead of bleeding interest or rolling the dice, I borrow at 0% and stash that cash where it grows—earning interest, not paying it. They call this clever hustle “stoozing,” and no, it’s not a typo or some late-night joke. It’s a legit strategy pioneered by savvy folks back in the 2000s, turning credit card offers into a steady side income. If you’re scratching your head wondering where to find a magical 0% credit card with a fat limit, or how to dodge tax and credit score hits, stick around. I’ve been in the trenches, navigating the pitfalls and profits. Ready to flip the script on debt and make your money work a little harder? Let’s dive in. LEARN MORE

New contributor Frugalist explains how stoozing enables him to supercharge his savings. And if those words make no sense to you then luckily we’ve got 2,000 more where they came from…

Never get into debt and never gamble. Those were the only two pieces of financial advice my mother ever gave me.

Unfortunately by my late teens I’d figured out how to profit from both. It caused no end of horror when the logo-covered post began to arrive.

Today I’m much closer to that maternal ideal though.

I save, I invest, and I never miss my debt payments.

Oh yes – I’m still in debt.

However I’ve got debt on my terms now. I pay no interest, and rather than gambling with my borrowings I’m putting the proceeds into a sure thing – savings that pay me interest.

This is called ‘stoozing’ and no, I didn’t invent that term while smoking something funny.

Instead I must give credit to the stoozing pioneers in the 2000s. Some of you may even be grey enough to remember discussion board user Stooz, after whom the practice is named. (The Investor is ancient enough to confirm this).

In those halcyon early days, I was too worried about school and finishing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

But I caught on eventually – and to this day I remain an ardent credit card stoozer.

What is stoozing?

In essence, stoozing means borrowing money at 0%, then stashing it somewhere else that pays more than 0% as interest.

You can then sit back and enjoy the fruits of your arbitrage:

You borrow £50,000 at 0% and stick it in an account paying 5% interest
That’s £2,500 in your pocket every year

I can already hear the complaints!

What about your credit file? What about tax? Where is this magical 0% credit card with a £50,000 limit?

Okay, okay – it isn’t quite that easy.

But it is completely true that I’ve meaningfully supplemented my own income with relatively little effort through stoozing this way.

Tools of the stooze

There are three kinds of credit cards that make stoozing a reality.

First is a 0% spending card. With these, you spend on your 0% card as usual until you reach your credit limit, making minimum repayments as you go to avoid paying interest. You put the cash that would have gone on spending into a savings account instead.

Second is a money transfer card, where you move money from a credit card into your bank account for a one-off fee.

Third is a balance transfer card. Here you take debt from one credit card and shift it onto another – usually for a small transfer fee. Balance transfer cards are great for rolling over the debt that you’ve already built up.

Wealth warning Remember, I’m moving this debt into cash savings, so net-net I’m not actually going into debt. I can always repay my card balances with my accumulated savings, hence the risk of responsible stoozing is very low. However if you don’t trust yourself to be completely disciplined then don’t go near stoozing with a bargepole.

How to get started with stoozing

The process is best illustrated with an example.

Let’s imagine that Jane gets a 0% spending card with a credit limit of £11,000. After a year of using this card for normal spending – and saving the cash she’d otherwise have spent – she has a balance of £10,000 on the card and £10,000 in her savings account.

Jane then gets another card. This time it’s a 0% money transfer card. With this she can transfer £12,000 to her bank account with a 2% fee (£240).

At this point, Jane has £22,000 of cash savings, and is down £240 from the transfer.

But over the coming year, she makes 4.5% in her savings account. Like this Jane earns herself £990, leaving a £750 profit for the year.

Even if Jane earns an above-average £40,000, this is more than a week’s net wages.

When her credit cards start to come towards the expiration date of their 0% rate period, Jane can get a balance transfer card, to move her debts to the new card. This keeps the game going.

At the more extreme end, I’ve even stoozed with a personal loan, when borrowing rates dipped below 3%.

Fees and taxes are a drag

Typically, you pay lower pro-rated fees on shorter deals. Below I’ve set out how this affects the annual profit, based on some of the currently available deals on the market.

I’ve assumed a £10,000 balance transfer with the cash saved in a 4.5% savings account, which earns £450 annual income.

Transfer Fee	Months	Annualised Fee	Annual Profit
2.99%	34	1.06%	£344
1.49%	22	0.81%	£369
No fee	14	0%	£450

You can see that short-term cards have the most profit potential, in exchange for the extra hassle of shorter timescales.

The long-term cards are still worth a look though. With these you can avoid repeated credit checks, reduce the hassle involved with transferring balances, and keep that stoozed capital working for you for a longer period.

Either way, a single card could net you around £1,000 profit over three years – or more if you’re happy to renew every 14 months.

Don’t forget about tax

You’ll probably pay tax on your savings interest:

As a 20% basic-rate taxpayer you can earn £1,000 tax-free from savings
As a higher-rate 40% taxpayer your allowance falls to £500
At 45% you are considered so rich that you get no allowance

Here’s what each bracket of taxpayer would earn on three different savings balances at 4.5% after income tax is deducted, taking into account the personal savings allowance:

Savings	0%	20% (£1,000 allowance)	40% (£500 allowance)	45% (No allowance)
£10,000	£450	£450	£450	£248
£25,000	£1,125	£1,100	£875	£619
£50,000	£2,250	£2,000	£1,550	£1,238

Even as a higher-rate taxpayer, a £10,000 savings pot at current easy access rates won’t attract tax. So just dipping your toe into the stoozing waters may be appealing.

But to push the envelope further you’ll need to explore tax-free savings products.

My preference is Premium Bonds. But also consider gilts or even a standard cash ISA (assuming you won’t otherwise be filling your stocks and shares ISA with, um, stocks and shares).

Stoozing and emergency funds

Here’s another angle to think about for anyone chasing financial independence.

Some gurus argue against emergency funds if you’re striving for FIRE, on the basis that keeping any capital in cash creates too great a drag on total investment growth.

For instance, if you start your FIRE journey by saving up a £40,000 emergency fund in a cash account that only matches inflation – and only after that’s in place go on to take another 20 years accumulating your investments – then if those investments earn a 7% annual real return, you’ve missed out on £115,000 of growth on the money that’s stuck in your rainy day warchest.

On the other hand, if you skip the emergency fund and lose your job when the market is down, then you could do even worse by needing to withdraw from your investments at a low ebb.

However I think stoozing can act as a middle ground.

Rather than funding your £40,000 emergency fund at the expense of your investments, you could instead fuel at least a part of the fund with 0% credit card debt.

Ideally your debts will be structured as a ladder (effectively the opposite of a bond ladder).

Like this, chunks of 0% debt come due each year and can be renewed, rather than the entire amount coming due in the same year, with the risk that lenders won’t cover it all.

This way if you lose your job, you can spend your stoozed cash before needing to touch your investments. This should help you avoid selling your equities at the bottom.

Proceed with caution

Of course my suggestion isn’t a get out of jail free card.

If you burned through your entire emergency fund over the course of a year, then I reckon you’d prefer not to also have £40,000 of credit card debt to think about.

But on the flip-side, you’re protecting yourself against most short-term emergency scenarios, without bearing the full cost of an emergency fund. You should also have a larger investment portfolio to sell from if needed – even if it dips from time to time.

Why not just pay for any emergencies with a credit card if you need to?

Well, I’d argue that you can’t rely on credit cards or lines of credit in a crisis, because lenders can take them away when you need them most.

With my suggestion you’ve taken on the debt already. The lenders gave you the money cheaply when you were less of a risk.

In contrast they probably wouldn’t want someone who has lost their job to owe tens of thousands on credit cards…but tough luck. They’ve already made their decision and you’ve already borrowed the money.

Finally, if you are on a very secure professional path, like to live by the seat of your pants, and you eat risk for breakfast, then you could go one step further and eschew savings accounts altogether. Just throw your 0% proceeds straight into the market.

That’s not for me though. It exposes you to too many ways for things to go wrong – and potentially all at once.

Perhaps my mother did get to me after all.

Other downsides to stoozing

On the subject of risk, I’ve heard a drumbeat of a thousand ‘buts’ in the background.

You’re right! There are lots of other negatives to think about before stoozing.

A big one is mortgage lenders. Here you’re at the whims of computer-driven decision machines, who look at your credit file and care little about the interest rate of your debt.

If you’re holding more credit card debt than your annual net salary, they can start to get a bit jumpy. (And not all of us can talk our way into getting a bespoke mortgage.)

One option is to time the ending of your 0% periods around your mortgage renewal date, so you pay them down to a level that lenders don’t care about. (For me this has had the added bonus of reducing the anguish of my long-suffering mortgage broker.)

If you check a couple of ‘How much can I borrow?’ tools from the big lenders, you can get a picture of how much 0% credit card debt you can take on without it wrecking your maximum mortgage borrowing amount.

Another option is to keep renewing your mortgage with the same lender.

This enables you to secure a more competitive rate than the standard variable rate, but without you having to freshly pass the underwriters’ desk.

On the record

Securing other credit cards and overdrafts can be even more pesky for the same reasons. Again they seem to me to get especially anxious when credit card debt exceeds annual net salary, but it’s not an exact science.

Of course, as dedicated Monevator readers we’d never be looking to get a credit card to actually amass proper Pay Interest To Have Stuff Now debt.

But suppose you wanted to get into the credit card points hacking game?

Someone who could be the perfect candidate for the latest air miles reward card with a juicy £100 sign-up bonus, say, may well be rejected if their credit file makes it look like they’re carrying the same debt as a small developing world country.

In this case you might write letters of appeal to the underwriters, boasting about your meaty pile of offsetting Premium Bonds. Really – I too was surprised to discover that this can work.

But it takes a pretty special offer to motivate me to try.

Should you start stoozing?

I wouldn’t blame you if you said stoozing isn’t worth the hassle.

But personally I’m expecting to make around £3,000 in net profit this year. And even in the years of rock bottom rates, I still found opportunities.

To me that’s worthwhile money. All made by doing something I think of as fun.

In true Monevator fashion, I’ve even ploughed my stoozing profits into my investment portfolio. This supercharges the returns from stoozing even further.

The big downside – one that I have no argument against – is that people will think you’re weird if you let it slip that you have 23 credit cards.

So try not to discuss stoozing at parties.

Especially if my mother is there.