Debt Juggling With Loan & Credit Card Advice

big_gb_2

Excuse the new profile. I have some ex-colleagues that I dont want viewing this.

ok here it is. I need advice with juggling some debts a little.

Last July I took out a loan. I needed 10k and took out a loan with the bank for 7k and took another 3k from a creditcard. The bank stung me with the rate (16.5%). But i had no time to look elsewhere.

The Financial Bit:

Bank Loan: £7000
Term: 48 mths (42 payments to go)
Monthly repayments: £201.00
Rate: 16.5%
Balance if I keep paying until end: 8,657.62
Settlement figure until april 10: 6830.55

There were 3 months initial payments holiday which I took which worked nicely in with my car loan finishing. So the £200 per month for my car started repaying my loan.

Virgin Credit Card Outstanding: 7,036.80
Monthly repayments: £25 (the minimum)
Credit Limit: 8,400
0% Offer Expires in June


Problem I have is what is the best thing to do to reduce things.
I will have an extra £250 each month which I want to use to repay debts - that should start this month. So my monthly debt repayments are approx £450 per month.

I need to think about moving my credit card balance. I was thinking maybe to move that to another card, but dont think I will get enough credit on a card to do so.

Oh, and I have a Halifax One Card with a £6700 limit which I have just cleared. They keep sending me offers to transfer a balance to it @ 6.95% for the life of the balance (3% transfer fee) - I thought this might be an idea to clear off the loan, effectively halving the APR.. ? But its with the same bank, is this even possible...?

Any advice is greatly appreciated... even getting this down in writing has helped

cheers,
B

GeorgeUK

You need to be careful with balance transfers - most only allow transfers between cards. If you want to pay off an overdraft or loan, you would need to use a card that did 'super balance transfers' which basically means they allow money transfers as part of any balance transfer promotion.

From what you have put above, the only way you would be able to pay off the loan would be to do a SBT to your current account and use that money to pay off the loan.

I know that Virgin allow SBT's but don't know about Halifax - i doubt it though.

You could crunch the numbers and see if you can do a balance transfer from Halifax to Virgin in June when the 0% runs, then do a SBT using the now empty Virgin card in July to pay off the loan. You would need to see if there was any saving in this and to make sure you could afford the monthly payments for these, but this may be an option.

Make sure to check that you would be able to do a transfer to your current account using the Virgin card though - i'm pretty sure you can.