Credit card interest rates

futureproofing_2

OVer the last 14 months I have found it increasingly harder to pay anything more than minimum payments on my credit cards. I do have quite a lot of debt on the cards around £25k but I spent the money when I thought the interest rates were reasonable but in January 2009 all the cards hiked their interest rates to well over 30% some 34%. The only one that did give me the option of rejecting the hilke was EGG and I did. I earn approx £45K. I used to be able to swap from one card to the other getting 0% interest deals but these seem to have dried up. I have paid off arounf £7000 off the one card, it had the highest interest rate, thinking I would be able to use the rest of the credit limit to shuffle but they have not reissued me with another card I only owe £3000 on it and did have a limit of £12000. Not sure why they won't give me a card in the light of the fact that I have paid off a lot of the money owed. Now that the other cards have followed suit with higher interest rates I am stuck and think its going to take 40 years to get out of debt if I live that long. I have tried my bank HSBC there stance is why should we take on other banks debt when we haven't been bailed out by the government! I don't know what to do, any ideas?

pure_dead_dopey

Hi Future

Its a very common situation, it certainly was where we were. You spend the money and then the interest rate shoots up and basically you are in a lot of trouble. Now that you've realised that you may have a problem, a good way to start is to post up an SOA here and the very experienced peeps on this board can have a look and try to suggest ways for you to cut down om spending, its not always painful, often there are ways that you haven't thought of. Personally we've cut our grocery bill from around £600 ish to well under £400, (4 adults including 2 sportsmen) and its not really hurting, takes a bit more effort but lots is pretty easy. You might also want to look at the snowballing tool on this site, that will help with getting the most expensive paid the quickest. You have a really good salary and I suspect there could be lots of ways to scale back, well done for realising that you were heading for trouble, keep posting and you will be supported through all of this.

futureproofing_2

Thanks very much. I have scaled back but I am sure I can learn lots from the people on this site.

bertman

I have an HSBC card which has an APR of 34.9%!! They won't reduce it so that has made me more determined to pay it off and close it down, I will never bank or lend from this company again - it won't hurt HSBC but it will make me feel better - they are total s+++s...