Yeah, this has been done, but it’s about debt consolidation. Actually, I know that I’ve read stuff before on here, but such knowledge didn’t sink in at the time.
I just got off the phone with my CC company. I owe them some money, and ok, a good bit of money. It is kinda like the problem where they won’t accept payments under 400-450 a month (I only owe about 1500) but I did the math and she did the math and we both saw that if I paid that much, I’d not have enough for rent. They asked me for a smaller payment, ya know, 395 or something. anyways, I came close to an agreement with them but I thought about consolidation, so I wanna know.
I know that debt consolidation is something that is usually not-for-profit, and you have to be careful not to get one who is charging you a lot more than they should, so I’m asking for reccomendations. I do have student loans but I am still in college, so they are just there and deferred till graduation. I came to the best place I know for info, so here it goes.
Where should I begin looking for debt consolidators? I honestly don’t know if I feel comfortable clicking the first through google, so where do I start?
I’m confused … you just have the one debt, and it’s $1500, and they want $400-$500 monthly payments? Who the HELL did you borrow from?
To consolidate you typically have more than one debt. Say you owe one CCCompany $2,000, and you have a car loan for $12,000 and you have a furniture loan for $5,000. Your minimum monthly payments on all 3 add up to $900. You would take out a loan to consolidate all 3 debts, pay it off over a longer period of time, and your monthly payments for that loan would say be $600.
I just posted recently about this place called prosper.com and it seems like a common usage of it is for people try to consolidate, hopefully at lower rates.
prosper.com is an eBay style site where lenders and borrowers bid on loans.
If you only need $1500 or $1000, it seems like there’s a better chance of getting funded than if you need $5000 or so. Your loan can be distributed across many people.
If your credit rating lists you as “High Risk” though, don’t hold your breath.
Never been through debt consolidation here, but 1,500 (dollars?) doesn’t seem like that huge an amount of money and isn’t an unreasonable amount to pay off just doing some minimal monthly payments - e.g. the bare minimum 2% would only be 30 dollars a month. Even if your interest rate is in the punitive range (e.g. 30% a year would be 2.5%, or 37.50, a month) you’d think they’d recognize that you could pay down the balance and bring the account current on far, far less than 400 a month… and they might make more money from you in the long run.
Obviously there’s more to the story, or you’d have already had that discussion with the company. I guess one advantage of going through a credit counselling service is there’s a chance they could get your rate reduced.
What Stainz said: a $400-500 payment on $1500? No way. Did you typo, and mean $15,000?
And I also second that you need more than one debt to use debt consolidation (IIRC, your student loan won’t be considered a debt until you finish school). You seriously need to go talk to someone at your bank and get educated about debt and credit before you do anything else.
You should look into getting a loan with reasonable interest rates. If you’re a student, there’s probably a credit union you can join. Credit unions are always easier to work with. If youre credit is bad, you may need a cosigner, could one of your parents cosign? I rolled multiple credit card debt of $8000 into a credit union loan and wound up with payments of only $200 so they’d be much more reasonable for just $1500.
I’m thinking they’re demanding so much because you must be really late on payments, right? Even if you can’t get a loan, you should still be able to work out a better payment plan. (at this point, your credit is already shot so don’t worry too much about threats they make) The credit card company can’t make you pay what you don’t have.
At a 30% APR (which is really high), the interest is only around $39. So even if you can only afford $100 (or even just $75) a month, you’ll still be working towards paying off the debt
Assuming that’s no typo, it’s possibly not a loan but rather an accounting problem. My SO’s checking account somehow got totally screwed up, not even the bank really knows how, but they say she owes them nearly $800–payable in $75/month installments.
No, Misnomer and the others are correct…I did make a typo…it is 15000…eep, sorry guys
also, I am only going to school part-time over summer…this past month there was one week where I only worked 40 hours, other than that I work about 50-55 a week depending on who is wanting time off. At the very least, I work 32 a week (this is rare) but yeah, I’m sorry about the typo guys…haha
oh, and it’s 15000 from two separate debts, I just added them together because I was typing quickly. pretty much, one is for about 10 and the other is for about 4900, since there is 2 I thought consolidation to get a better rate or anything else…
eh…
Something I’ve done a bit in the past is to just transfer the balances of a few cards onto one of those offers of “no interest for one year” cards. Sometimes there is a fee to make the transfer, but as long as you make your payments in a timely manner you’ll save all sorts of money in the meantime. If you don’t have it payed off in a year, transfer it again a month before the original year expires.
Definitely visit your bank first and see what they can do for you. Anywhere else would probably charge you close to what you’re paying now.
Plus, if you have been defaulting on your payments, it is likely no-one will want to touch you until your credit rating is cleaned up.
Plus, if you consolidate, in order to get smaller monthly payments, you will be paying the loan off over a much longer term, which is a shitty monkey to have on your back for the future.
The OP stated that they offered you a smaller payment option of $395 per month? Personally, I would recommend going for it.