Does this make any sense?

Mupeteer

I've got something about this on my diary thread but I'm looking for some comments from others about my situation. Sorry it seems so long.

My debts as they stand are like this:

Virgin: limit £7,400 current balance £6960.82 APR 34.9 from March
Lloyds TSB: limit £11,000 current balance £10443.40 APR 16.9%
Barclaycard: limit £6,000 current balance £3960.52 APR 6.9 LOB
Egg: limit £3,100 current balance £0 APR 17.9 (BT anniversary rate not available until July)
Cahoot loan: limit £6,000 current balance £0 APR 15.9%
Cahoot o/d: limit £2,000 current balance £1894.08

I've spent some time on the phone to my credit card companies to see how I can shuffle things and what rates I can get and these are the results:

Virgin have lowered my APR to 22.9%. Still a hideously high rate but better than 34.9%.
Egg have told me that I have a 0% rate on my account until 1st September 2008 with a 2.5% BT fee.
Cahoot "have no plans to review their rates."
Barclaycard can offer me a BT rate of 6.9% LOB, with no transfer fee.
Lloyds TSB - I don't really have much in the way of spare capacity on this but they have had some reasonable LOB transfer rates in the past.

So, given the above I thought I could do the following:

Transfer £ 3230 from Lloyds TSB to Egg (BT fee of £80.75) at 0% until September
Transfer £ 1439.40 from Lloyds TSB to Barclaycard (no fee) LOB 6.9%
Transfer £ 5774 from Lloyds TSB to Cahoot flexiloan 15.9%

This leaves me with zero balance on Lloyds TSB. When cleared then move all my Virgin debt £6960.82 to my Lloyds card. Hopefully I'd be able to get a decent LOB rate for this (probably subject to a 3% fee) but if not the interest would still be less than I would be paying to Virgin.

I hope that all makes sense.

That would mean my minimum payments would be:

Barclaycard £122
Egg £65
Lloyds TSB £144
Cahoot £116

I'd be scraping by with these figures but I reckon this is the best I can do right now. Any left over money would go to the one with the highest rate (Lloyds TSB).

RAS

have you put your existing arrangment and proposed arrangement into the snowball on www.whatsthecost.com, to see what the effect is?

is there a more effective way to do it when you play with the snowball?

I also note that the whole thing hangs on

being able to get a Decent LOB in the BT to the Lloyds card.

and to do that you are paying a 2.5% BT transfer fee for more than your existing limit on thhe cahoot loan to get a few months at 0% and a higher longer term rate?

Would you be better cleairng as much as possible off your Virgin card directly to th lower cost CCs? Then cutting your credit limit on Virgin or closing the account. At the moment you have £10,000 of unused credit that must be affectign your credit rating.

Mupeteer

Even if I don't get a decent LOB rate from Lloyds TSB it still wont be any higher than my standard APR of 16.9%.

I have used the Snowball calculator and it seems to be agood idea this way.

Once I've got the debt away from Virgin I'll close that altogether.