Credit Card "Freezing"

Requesting_Advice

Credit Card "Freezing" - is it possible with out bad consequences?
Hello to everyone on this amazing site, my wife & i have had so much help & advice from the threads on here but one questio (among many) seems to not be approached, that is the question of freezing credit card interest.

We have a MINT card an EGG card a BarclayCard & a Natwest card, all with extortionate rates of interest. We wrote to all of them requesting that they reduce the interest - B'card were the only ones who actually replied with a 50% drop, we then of course wrote to them saying thank you and could they drop it sdown even more - which they also aggreed to do, we are now sitting at 6.3% it IS possible to reduce the interest with a letter explaining your circumstance and being honest with them and making active decisions to get out of debt, we allso included a statement of means form - very important as it breaks down your incomings & outgoings.

What we are in the middle of doing is seeing whether we can freeze the interest on our credit cards without going to a Debt management organisation or an IVA. We are comfortable with the idea of being in bad credit for the following 5 years after we have paid it off because we are paying £60 per month to MINT and the min payment is £56, the interest is £44, that makes me physically sick.

Please please please please :money: show us another way of doing this as we want to clear our debt as quick as we can, we got married 2 tears ago & between us had around £30k debt, we now have 19k, we are making big steps in our lifestyle & food etc to get out of this noose, and we would like to stay away from Debt Management - because they also charge interest & you can only pay a set amoubnt - unless you know of a company that doesn't and can allow you to pay off as much off your debt as possible.

Thank you so much for reading this - i look forward to hearing some resonses.

Merlot

Welcome to the board RA. You can off course write to them, but unlike the Barclaycard, I don't think you will have to too much success, you have cleared a lot of your debt already but with the rising living costs today, are you finder it harder and harder to repay the debts?

Could you list an SOA (incomings and outgoings) so we can help you reduce your outgoings.

CCCS, are fantastic, they are a debt charity, they will help you, even if you don't want to go down the route of DMP, there website is very useful, take a look. http://www.cccs.co.uk/

Merlot.x.

MajjicMouse

Maybe I'm not reading you properly (I'm new and have a head full of flu which doesn't help!) but could I ask why you're asking for interest freezes? Is it because you can't get credit anywhere or are you merely looking to reduce payments?

If you can't get credit anywhere there are others who can help you better, but it may be worth asking the most 'helpful' card if they'll raise your credit limit and allow you to transfer at least one balance from another card. That would at least save you some interest in the short term.

Two years ago my husband was made redundant and some financial skeletons in the closet had to be dealt with, one of which was the amount of credit cards we had between us:-
Egg cards x 2
Virgin cards x 2
MBNA cards x 2
Marbles card
HSBC Gold card
Halifax card


plus loans, all with extortionate interest rates. Our credit rating was shot meaning we couldn't get a 0% to solve the problem. I therefore figured out which cards had the lowest interest rates and transferred balances between them.

For example, the Halifax and MBNA cards had the highest interest rates so I looked to redistribute those balances across one or more of the other lower interest cards such as Egg and HSBC. It took some juggling and calculations but once transferred I closed the 'empty' cards down to make sure they weren't used again. I reduced 9 cards to 3 and made something like £300 per month reduction in interest payments. It was a good short term solution and once our credit rating improved we bunged the lot onto one 0% card.

Hope this helps.

Requesting_Advice

MajjicMouse thank you for the great advice we had not considered the option of putting it on to another existing low interest card that is an idea we will follow up, we'll let you know how that turns out. We have an Statement of Means Form already drafted and have cut back considerably, we have 400 pouunds going out each month on debt but only 1/2 that is the debt being reduced by, we now have money lefta t the end of the month so we will take that off of one of the cards in an attempt to end it. All the very best to you, will post responses once sent of letters of request.