question help: Financial Question: - Help.com

Consolidation is a bad idea 99.3% of the time. After consolidation the payments you make go first to pay off the new interest. Meanwhile all your creditors remain unpaid for that period of time, even if that is years…

You would be better off doing the Dave Ramsey www.daveramsey.com debt snowball. List all your debts including car payment from smallest to biggest. Pay only the minimum to all except the smallest. Give it everything you got! Hold garage sales so often your children will think they’re next. Once the smallest is paid, roll that payment into the minimum you were paying the second smallest. Like a snowball. Once the second is paid off, roll that payment into the third. See where this is going?

I agree with above. I would look at what you can sell of value to knock off the first (smallest) credit card. Then the next one. Can you sell a vehicle? Ebay is great to unload jewelry and other valuables. Everyone has some stuff they can part with and usually more than they think. Start making a list! Good luck.

Haha. you guys are awesome. We’re in FPU right now, and yes Debt consolidation is bad. But as far as it goes, I feel like we can just barely make the mininum payments on everything. The worst offending credit card has a min payment of almost 400/month because it’s balanced at 12K at 18%. While we’re paying that kind of min payment it’s making it really hard to pay off the lower debts faster. Oh, and for FPU people, we’re still getting the 1K in the savings account first. With the way our budget is going our living expenses take too much and we’ve cut as much as we can. (Plus we’ve a baby on the way, so that’s an added expense)