Credit Card Abitrage is Back: Citi Cards No Fees 0% Offer

I was surprised to get a 0% balance transfer offer with no balance transfer fee today from Citi Cards. Lately they seem to all be 3% fee and have gone from $99 caps to no caps. It seemed like the days of no fees were well gone, as I hadn't gotten an offer like that in over 9mos. What a difference from having them regularly 2-3/mo from any number of banks for years. Does this mean that the credit markets are turning back up, or that Citi is just desperate to get more customers in their card business?

In any case, I'll take free money for 12 months any day of the week. The arbitrage benefits aren't as good these days: high yield savings are pretty low, and heloc payments aren't bad either with prime at 3.25%. Like I said, free money. It's very easy to make $300-400 off the deal still even in a bad yield market.

googhydr-20, who are you?

I've been researching different ways to make money on the web using arbitrage. I've used credit card arbitrage for a long time (it's how I paid off my 6 years of college debt in 2 years, but that's a story for another day). Credit Card arbitrage is getting harder to do because too many people know about it, and because the prime rate is so low and cards rarely offer free balance transfers anymore, so what you can make per month on it is nominal and not worth my time anymore. So I've started looking for a new slight of hand to make a few extra bucks here and there.

The thing I've read a lot about recently and have been doing some research on is adwords arbitrage using google adwords. In doing some various tests, there seems to be someone out there that is a step ahead of me at every turn. With the big ole internet, I'm pretty used to that. In fact, there are usually thousands ahead of me. Everywhere I turn I keep seeing one particular amazon associate id (googhydr-20, and of also googhydr-21 on amazon.co.uk). This person seems to have tagged every single amazon product and nearly ever possible google search keyword! I'm amazed! I can only guess that this person, whoever they are have managed to amass a large fortune for themselves.

Oddly enough, nobody else has written about this person that I can tell. I googled googhydr and googhydr-20 just to confirm, and all I can find is 3 pages of links where folks have copy/pasted the URL into their blog to talk about a product. They're all random folks too so I don't think they even realize they're giving this person some free press. So it makes me start to wonder... [tinkly music should play here, but I was too lazy to search for some in creative commons] Is this possibly Google's ID? Are they getting amazon referral fees for forwarding traffic to amazon (probably at the tick of 8-10% per amazon transaction)? I tried to figure out what the tracking ID stood for, but the best I can come up with for googhydr is "Google Hider."

In any case, I found this amazing, and since nobody has managed to write about it, I decided it was my time.

More on my forays in arbitrage to come.

Oh, and if you want to help me out. Click on the Amazon spinner below. I picked out a few interesting songs that I'd heard today, and I thought you might like as well. Amazon has an amazing MP3 store now with DRM-Free music (can I hear a wooo hooo?) priced at a great price (.89-.99 per track). And even better, I get 10% commission if I can point people to go there and buy.