No. But you don't have to be bad at maths to play exploitably.
Many years ago now I was a hand-to-mouth graduate student. New credit card companies wanted to attract customers so they offered an easy approval card with 0% finance for 18 months. Need to use some of your new credit on existing debts? Rather than figure out all the specifics they just included a cheque book with the product, just write a cheque to pay any debts and it goes on your 0% balance.
Everybody I knew took out a card, write the full credit amount on a cheque, paid it into a fixed term savings account.
Account term ends, you pay off the 0% card, keep the interest, cut the card in half and you're done. Free money.
The people who ran those new card companies knew this might happen, they just didn't guess it would happen often enough to ruin them. Not our problem. A few years later the deals on offer explicitly did not have a way to cash out. Lesson learned.
No. But you don't have to be bad at maths to play exploitably.
Many years ago now I was a hand-to-mouth graduate student. New credit card companies wanted to attract customers so they offered an easy approval card with 0% finance for 18 months. Need to use some of your new credit on existing debts? Rather than figure out all the specifics they just included a cheque book with the product, just write a cheque to pay any debts and it goes on your 0% balance.
Everybody I knew took out a card, write the full credit amount on a cheque, paid it into a fixed term savings account.
Account term ends, you pay off the 0% card, keep the interest, cut the card in half and you're done. Free money.
The people who ran those new card companies knew this might happen, they just didn't guess it would happen often enough to ruin them. Not our problem. A few years later the deals on offer explicitly did not have a way to cash out. Lesson learned.