Consolidation loan for very poor credit

jon1967

Hi.

For a few different reasons I am 54 years old and have a circa £42k debt burden, mostly at high rates. I have a good salary that has allowed me to maintain repayments previously but Covid put a stop to that. The plain facts are a £58k gross salary, about £42k high interest debt all unsecured and current pension pot of £28k. I have no other assets for security and my credit score is extremely poor. I am basically locked out of refinancing despite my ability to support lower interest lending. The nature of my profession means bankruptcy would result in the loss of my job. If anyone has a miracle cure they can spare please do enlighten me, so I can have some quality of life before the window closes.

onlyfoolsandparking

Don't know about the miracle cure but there's always a way out of these situations. It's not really my area of expertise but there are plenty of people on here who give sound advice but they will definitely need a lot more info from you in order to help and if me telling you that helps speed things up for you then my reply wasn't wasted, was it?

Have you looked at the debt free wannabe boards, would you post a SOA there, that should be one of the first things to look at doing.

Going off the limited info you've given, are you keeping up with minimum payments? If yes then I would be throwing everything you can at ONE debt at a time, then when that's cleared move onto the next and add the money you would be saving having paid the first debt off and so on. If your not keeping up with minimum payments then a different route will be needed and others will advise accordingly, I wish you well though. 

p3ncilsharpener

Lending is based on risk.  Of course lower interest rates would be more affordable, they'd be more affordable to everyone,  but offering everyone a low interest rate would result in bankruptcy of the lenders, some people will default regardless of how much interest is charged.

If bankruptcy isn't an option maybe look at an informal debt solution such as a DMP instead.

MalMonroe

You could do worse than contact one of the free debt help agencies. I always recommend StepChange because they helped me to get out of terrible financial trouble a few years ago. 

It's a free phone call and they are very non-judgemental. You can either accept or reject their suggestions, it's entirely up to you. But at least you can talk things through with someone who knows what they are talking about. Here's the link -

https://www.stepchange.org/

Just make sure you have a list of your incomings and outgoings - aka a Statement of Account (SOA) before you call, so you can go through it with the advisor. It really is well worth the effort. 

[Deleted User]

Consolidation loans work on the basis of existing debt PLUS new loan debt as there is no guarantee you wouldn't just spend it all on blackjack and hookers - do you realistically think you can afford 84k of debt (or rather, do you think a lender would consider that?)

I'd go to the debt free pages and get help there. There are a couple of approaches known as the snowball method, depending on how disciplined you are. If you need quick wins or you give up, they say to pay off the smallest loan first, then use the money you free up to pay the next smallest, repeat until clear, though this takes more time to pay off. If you are disciplined, pay the minimum on all of them and throw all your cash at the highest interest rate loan which is adding the most to your debt, the more you pay off, the less interest is added so you clear your debt overall faster