advice on debts please

badlandbru

I owe £38,000.00, I am paying all my bills and am paying off my debts slowly (very slowly). I earn £50,000.00 per year bringing home £2800.00 per month after tax etc etc.

my out goings with food and fuel are £2000.00 per month.

I have two intrest free deals on Credit cards at the moment that end Dec 2011 both have £7000.00 on and are included in that £38,000.00 figure, the rest is a bank loan at 10.3% which I have 4 years still to run on.

I would love some advice on how I can bring the outlay down, I was hoping to take out two longer term loans ie over 10 yrs to reduce my payments.

rising_from_the_ashes

Hello and welcome to the boards.

On first glance, you're on a very good income and appear to have plenty of income to meet your repayments each month. However, the first thing I'd suggest would be to post a detailed Statement of Affairs https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/107280

We can then have a look over this and see if/where there's places where you may be overspending and advise on ways to cut things back.

Generally, the advice is usually to avoid taking on consolidation loans etc as it rarely works and end up adding to your debts. (I'd especially advise you not to move debt from a cc with 0% interest to a loan which will def have interest).

However, post the SOA and you'll get loads of useful advice from everyone.

dancingfairy

i suspect that you won't be able to get any credit 38k is quite high already in relation to your income - the trouble is if you applied for a loan of say 10k then the bank will look at it as youthen potentially owing 48k. they will not know that you plan to consolidate and you could in theory just spend that extra 10k and end up in a worse mess which wouldn't really be responsible lending then -if you see what i mean.
i don't think threre are any real shortcuts - go through your expenses and cut down where possible ,make sure you are getting value for money on any purchases, work at maybe increasing your income, perhaps look at shuffling your debt around - ie trasnferring between higher and lower interest cards etc but no real shortcuts that i know of.
Good Luck
df

toonarmydad

Hi, I've been a lurker on here for well over a year now and read this board avidly. I've never felt the need to post until now! There are many people with far more expertise than me who offer fantastic advice however I feel I need to offer you my experience as a cautionary tale! A good few years ago I had debt which was made manageable by a consolidation loan. I proceeded to spend in my old habits and a few years later I took out yet another consolidation loan and so it went on. My salary has doubled over this time (to over 50K) but my debt has at least trebled! Only in the last six months have I actually carried out the advice from this forum and keep a very close eye on where my money goes. My debt is rapidly reducing and I can honestly say my lifestyle hasn't changed significantly (nor has my wife and 3 kids!). My long winded advice is post your SOA and listen to the advice carefully and drill your debt over the shortest period. You may however be far better at budgeting etc than I ever was and choose to ignore this! Whichever I wish you the very best and thanks for reading.