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Not sure what to do now

I really am wondering what to do now.

For years we have been paying the minimum on credit cards (totalling around £12000) We also have a loan with around £5000 left with Tesco bank. (Yes I know being in debt is bad/stupid - these are very old debts from when were trying to survive unemployment after coming out of university. Been nursing them a minimum rate for around 8 years now. We have just never been able to get our incomes to overtake the minimums enough so we could start to repay the money!) The debt repayments are devouring our monthly disposable incomes at £435 a month we as things are just so expensive now we are lucky if we have £50 left over to put towards an overpayment. Anyway I decided to try to consolidate this into one payment with Tesco using their existing customer loans. So I went through the application only to fail on the question of affordability. It is just heart breaking to think that we can afford to pay £435 on debts which have no end date because we can only do the minimum payments yet we are not deemed able to afford to pay £235 a month for a loan which would be over in 7 years. Just one of our credit cards is £250 a month!! I was so hopeful! We would have been able to breathe again. Ironically we would have been able to afford to live again! I have not lived since I left university! Oh well back to the drawing board and try to find another way of scraping some more money for overpayments.

Not sure what to do now!

Comments

  • jobdone1
    jobdone1 Posts: 841 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 500 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    what is the apr on the credit cards big question i took a loan to consolidate and regret doing it but just keeping my head above water and 1 year into loan 4 years to go ahhhh anyway i never took enough out so still had to find another £7000 cleared most now down to £1450. Basically i would look at talking to cccs or payplan we might be able to guide you if you can give us some idea of your out goings by filling in an soa
  • ~Beanie~
    ~Beanie~ Posts: 3,043 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    The problem is that the loan company cannot guarantee that you will repay your existing credit cards with the new loan so they treat it as though you will have £12000 on credit cards, a £5000 loan and then a new loan of whatever amount you applied for.

    Post up an SOA and lets see if we can help: http://www.makesenseofcards.com/soacalc.html
    :p
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