The Save Money Blog

Posts Tagged ‘debt-consolidation’

A couple of people I know were talking about how much their children owed for their educations and I could not believe just how far in debt these kids were as a result of their student loan. I too found myself owing a lot of money when I graduated from university. I was paying off more in interest every month than I was paying for my loan.

My solution was to go to my bank and talk to them about my loan. It was the best thing I ever did and he actually said that If I had come to him a year or two earlier I would have been debt free. How did I pay it off? Debt consolidation. I took my two student loans and a car loan and consolidated them into one loan from the bank. The interest rate was so much lower it was crazy. I paid everything off in about a year. I probably would have been paying those two student loans off today. Talk to your bank and lower your debt.

I know all too well the pitfalls of credit card debt. You have two or three major cards and a few gas cards and you are living off of paying back the interest each month and that's about it. It's an awful hole to get stuck in but you can help yourself get out of it through debt consolidation.

What is Credit card debt consolidation? This is where you consolidate a number of cards into a lesser amount of cards. In the end you only want to have one or two cards at best. Basically you are doing a balance transfer where you transfer your balance on one credit card to another credit card. You will be getting a new Credit Card with a lower interest rate and using it to pay off the other cards with their much hight rate. You can also do this by getting a loan from your bank and pay off the cards at once and then work on paying your bank loan off. The interest rate from them has to be lower. I did this one once myself.

Find a 0% interest card offer and sign up for it. You then pay off your other higher interest rate card with the credit from the 0% card. Easy enough. Not really, you have to read all of the fine print and make sure you understand the terms, make the min payments and any other stipulations of the card. If you can do this you can get that bad debt paid off in no time.