Being maxed out on one card does cause a hit, but not as much as you might think. The people on Fatwallet who do this tend to have pretty high credit scores, and their scores would be even higher if they weren't doing this, and they do it not to build their credit scores, but to make money. I have been working Discover since 2003, I called to cancel my Discover card and they talked me out of it by offering various things, finally saying that they'd give me 0% forever on a BT. So I said OK. Loaded that one up to within $250 of the CL. They wouldn't give me a high enough CL to put that debt plus my wife's car on it, though. So we decided we were going to try to get the same deal on my wife's card, so she called them up and cancelled, and the let it go through without offering the ultimate deal. Then one day they called her up trying to get her back, offered 5.9%, she said no. Next day, they called offering the 0% deal, she said OK. Paid off her car with it, and otherwise loaded it up to within $5 of the CL. At that time, they had no BT fee and they let you make new transfers for about 4 months, so every month, I'd make the payment, then do a new BT in the amount of the payment. In 2005, they offered me a new card with 0% BT for life, 2 purchases per month, $29 fee. I reallocated CL from the old card (had some room because of making the payments for 1.5 years or so) and got it, put some other 0% BT debt onto it. The next year, they sent my wife an offer, I used this other card of hers to do a 0% BT to get a check to pay off some 0% debt of mine, to get it into her name, and then we did the Discover again. So from 2003-2006 our Discover debt didn't really go down because they kept giving us new opportunities to load it back up. My wife's Discovers are still loaded up pretty good because she reallocated limits and of course loaded on as much debt as the new card would take with the new limit. The key isn't, will doing this or that thing raise or lower your credit score, the key is, what can you do and still have your credit score high enough to do the stuff you want to do? Remember, that doing BT's isn't going to cause you any long term problems because you can easily fix any excessive damage that may occur by simply paying down whatever amount is needed. Oh, and it takes more than 5-6 years to pay a 0% for life. Way more. Because remember, the minimum payment is 2% of the balance. Every month when you make a payment, the balance decreases so 2% of the balance is a smaller amount, so your minimum payment is smaller. We used to take the difference and add it into our mortgage, but now that interest rates are better, we just let our savings build up instead. How long have you had your Diamond Card, and how many Citibank cards do you have? If you only have one, I'd go for another. When I got my first Citibank card, they didn't give me as high a credit limit as they were willing to give me, the second card filled it out. My first card, they only gave me about 60% of my total allowable limit. So if you only have one, you should think about getting a Citi Professional Card, Citi Professional Cash Card, or ATT Universal Card (without rewards, if you want to do BT). Those cards all have 0% BT for 12 months with NO FEE for BT's under the offer. And as you are no doubt aware, Citi lets you take a BT in the form of a check whenever you want to during the offer period.
