How can I reduce interest on debts?

mi33cupc@ke

Deleted post

poggs

jools02 wrote: »

Hi all,

Here are the cards and balances in case it helps:

Virgin - £6057
Halifax - £5888
Tesco - £3464
Nationwide - £938 - (will be paid in a few months)

I also have a loan with Lloyds TSB which was originally £19500 but now £6300.

Many thanks for any advice.

With the changing in Banks risk culture, they will pretty much only lend up to 50% of your income.

So you owe £22647. So to service that you need to be earning 45k a year. If you wanted additional borrowing you need to be earning 60k a year to allow you to get a 7500 loan.

If you earn less than this you have only 2 options. Go bankrupt (or do iva, dept repayment plan or similar) which is highly unrecommended as it'll trash your credit, or go down the snowball route, playing minimum payments to the accounts with the lower interest rates and everything else to the card with the highest interest rate.

I know you want to hear that you can go to company X who will do a 20k loan at 6.9% over 5 years to enable you to consolidate, but you wont be able to do this.

Sorry.

Two9A

If you're getting refused further credit, don't keep trying to apply! It'll only make your credit search history worse, making it ever harder to get credit.

You may just have to coast on the minimum payments for a few months until that NW loan's paid, then redirect the payment from that.

If you can, post an SOA up here, and get the interest rates for those cards/loans. You may be surprised how much you can save by shaving a few quid from groceries/entertainment/haircuts/etc... Any money saved can go towards overpaying, so that's the incentive.

nbinblack

Things to look at - what is the available balance on the cards, what is the interest on each. There may not be a BT charge when it is not to a 0% so you might be able to shift between them?

MrsTUS

Two9A wrote: »

If you're getting refused further credit, don't keep trying to apply! It'll only make your credit search history worse, making it ever harder to get credit.

You may just have to coast on the minimum payments for a few months until that NW loan's paid, then redirect the payment from that.

If you can, post an SOA up here, and get the interest rates for those cards/loans. You may be surprised how much you can save by shaving a few quid from groceries/entertainment/haircuts/etc... Any money saved can go towards overpaying, so that's the incentive.

I agree with this.

mi33cupc@ke

Thanks all. I did an SOA a while back and throwing everything I can spare at the debt. I've been snowballing and have already paid off two credit cards this year. I only applied for a couple of loans/credit cards because I know too many refusals can have a detrimental effect on credit score. Guess I'll just have to carry on as I am.