I am cleaning up the desk area and found a credit card offer that G-man saved in his "need to talk to Mysti" pile.
It is for a Visa card with a 0% interest for 12 billing cycles and 3% transfer fee. It is 12.99% interest after one year.
I have been looking for a way to pay less interest, and this certainly would be a way. If we took the same amount that I have been paying on CC1 that has the ridiculous 19.24% interest ($400 a month) and transferred that to this card, that would be $5000 plus the fee of $150, for a total of $5150. Paying the same exact amount of money we have been.....in one year we would have that card paid off, and it would all be principal. That would lower CC1 balance to about $11,000, with a minimal payment of $285, which would continue to go down over time.
Alternatively, we could transfer the money, and make minimal payments on it, and hit the other higher interest cards heavy.
Between the cards, the minimal payments would be:
CC1 - $285
CC2 - $200
CC3 - $140
New card - $400
Which is $1025 total. That is about $150 more than we are doing now, but in 1 year, we would have $5000 paid off, plus whatever else went toward the other cards.
Thoughts????
Very simply, I would not do this unless you stopped using credit cards altogether. Period. You have to be very sure about this part. Cut them up, no online purchases, nothing.
ReplyDeleteYou probably know, we have taken advantage of a 0% intro APR successfully, but we did not use credit cards for purchases AT ALL while we did.
That's my two bits.
I posted back in January-ish that I THOUGHT we had stopped using CC. Found out I was wrong. Since then, G-man took his CC out of his wallet, so he can't use it. I stopped using CC1 when my limit got cut in July, and haven't used it since. CC3 we never used to begin with....that was a failed balance transfer get out of debt attempt. CC4....that was error on my judgement. But that is going to get paid off in the next month.
ReplyDeleteSo, I would like to say YES, no more CC. I am also considering transfering less to a new card.
As I have said before, the interest rate is what is killing us on this. I think it is something like $650 in interest per month. And the idea of lowering that is very tempting.
First and foremost, you have to stop using them if you truly want to pay off debt. If you don't stop, you truly aren't as in control as you think (sorry if that sounds harsh, but I am speaking from experience and we learned the HARD way).
ReplyDeleteSecondly, you might want to consider peer to peer lending. I posted about it here.
Good luck!