Consolidate my debts?

chris11hogan

HI,

I am looking for advice on the best course of action to minimise my outgoings and decreasing my interest rates.

I have three credit cards:

1 - £2400 (spent £2200) TESCO;
2 - £5400 (spent £4600) BARCLAYS;
3 - £3000 (spent £0) HSBC.

I also have one loan of £5000 (£800 paid) HSBC.

I am currently paying out approximately £235.00 per month.

Given the time of the year (Christmas approaching) and also home improvements long needed I am enquiring to see if it would be advisable to consolidate all credit into one somehow?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Chris

double_mummy

what are the interest rates on the cards and the min repayments on cards and loan?

chris11hogan

HI, The interest rates are all around 18%. I am are currently paying £104 on the Loan pcm. Thanks

double_mummy

so £131 on the cards

the exact rates would be helpful in case you can make some savings moving things around

you can also do a SOA to see if we can help you cut back anywhere

Butti

The one BIG risk with consolidating is that you do nothing to change your behaviour and simply consolidate and continue to spend more than you have coming in. Is this you?

chris11hogan

I will have to look into the interest rates and compile a SOA.

I don't intent to continue the way i have. I want to cut up all credit cards, have a structure to paying off my debts and an aim to work towards. The position I'm in at the moment if something comes up i have the 'throw it on the credit card' attitude. Whereas if they're gone, they're gone.

[Deleted User]

chris11hogan wrote: »

I don't intend to continue the way I have.

With all due respect, nobody ever does.

Something caused you to run up these debts and, unless you change whatever it was, you will go back to the same spending, again and again.

As for consolidating, it seldom works, and you can take that from someone who's got the Tee-Shirt.

thebritishbloke

So long as you have a good repayment history, you could try and apply for a 0% BT card. This would be one way of "consolidating" them. Not much you could really do about the loan, is that at 18% too? If so, I'd try applying for an MBNA 0% card, they offer Money Transfers and Balance Transfers, so you could get a money transfer to settle the loan and use a balance transfer to transfer the CC debt. This all relies on you getting a large enough limit though.

As others have said though, you just need to make sure if you do consolidate debt etc, that you don't rack it up again.