Is this a good idea??

BabyStepper

You've paid off a huge amount of debt so obviously know what you're doing - well done to you and your wife.

I understand the temptation to move debt around so you have fewer debts to deal with. I sometimes want to do that too. However, where it costs you more or reduces your motivation, then it's a bad idea.

Can you tell us how long the loan is over? 5 years? 7? It looks like you're considering borrowing around £9k. So that would be 9% interest per year? This doesn't look like a good deal to me but I'm not clued up about loans. Maybe someone better informed can tell us how much it will cost you over the term of the loan?

I think you're in a panic about your wife's job and that you're trying to reduce monthly minimums in case she has no income. Looking at your soa, you can still survive even without her income, and overpay the debt. As someone said previously, with reduced travel, childcare and other things her net wage will be smaller. If you use your cash and her redundancy payment you could get all of the Halifax debt repaid straight away. (Keeping £1000 in emergency fund savings is a good idea, but you could pay off most of it.) Your monthly minimum payments would reduce to £645. This would give you even more leeway if it takes your wife a while to get a new job.

Just a few thoughts.

Happier_Me

I suffer from financial anxiety and personally I don't see a real fix for this for me, but I've found ways to help control it.... and that mostly involves having a clear plan of action to address a particular problem. We earn similar amounts as a household to you but we are mortgage free now with around £12k on cc's offset by savings to pay these off. The mortgage and our higher debt caused me huge amounts of anxiety at one point, it's better now its gone but I still suffer from financial anxiety and now fixate on different things instead. Saving for retirement and job losses and how this will impact retirement plans now happily feeds my financial anxiety instead, which is not helped by a decent paying job I don't enjoy doing and that isn't particularly secure. Again, having a sensible plan helps me keep these feelings in check.

In your shoes I would need a plan with regular review dates to ensure I stay on track and to maximise interest savings, I would feel comfortable not saving in favour of reducing debt because that would save money overall. One thing I hate more than having debt is paying interest on it!

Working on the basis that you have £2,000 a month spare (which effectively reduces your emergency fund savings to around £250 a month), I would tackle your remaining debts as follows:

By the way, forgive my calculations, I'm sure they are out but you get the idea. Snowball paying off your highest interest bearing debts first. The order may be different as cc's become interest bearing and if you do decide to consolidate, this still wouldn't change the plan, just reduce interest, so a win win...

Month 1 - Halifax cc 2: £2,028 + other minimums
Month 2 - Halifax cc 2: £722, Halifax cc £1,405 + other minimums
Month 3 - Halifax cc £2,555 + other minimums
Month 4 - Halifax cc £540, creation loan £1,843 + other minimums
Month 5 - creation loan £1,600 approx + other minimums
Month 6 - Target the next high interest cc card or loan...

You are doing really well, keep going, have a plan with an end date if you haven't already. Try to beat that end date by reducing interest along the way. Don't fret too much about redundancy, these things have a tendency to either not happen or sort themselves out... your wife will get another job if it happens and you can afford her loss of income anyway, just reduce your debt overpayments until she's employed again. You really do have this in the bag!