Debt consolidation
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Debt consolidation
| Thu, 05-19-2005 - 1:59pm |
Hi everyone. I wish I found this board when I was in the middle of all my debt problems. After nearly 10 years of being in debt (mostly from stupid spending habits during college), my husband and I finally decided enough is enough. We have been paying out nearly $1,200 per month in credit card bills. We both work full time, have two kids and it seemed like we were working for nothing - only to pay bills, bills, bills. This past January, my husband was laid off from his job for six weeks. He is a contractor in the IT field and got no severance and we had no savings. I ended up taking a loan out of my 401K to pay the bills. I am thankful that we were able to do this though. Once he got a new job, we decided we could not longer handle this big burden anymore. A friend of mine at work told me about a debt consolidation program that she in in. I have always been so skeptical about those (the ones you see on tv especially). We decided to give it a try. My husband called and he had to provide a complete budget to them, what we pay out monthly for bills, grocery, hair, daycare, car payment, entertainment and misc. items. It was hard to open up our financial situation to someone we don't know. We thought our debt was high, but they said it didn't compare to some of their other clients (in the six figures. This company does not advertise and are very reputable among the creditors. We received a very professional file with their plan to get us out of debt. They are going to be able to save us over $10,000 in interest and lower our payments to them by $400 per month. They even have a website where we can go to track our progress. We have setup a monthly draft with them and they take the money out of our account to pay our creditors, we don't have to pay 20 bills per month anymore. We will be completely debt free in a little over four years. The down side to this also is that we have to close all of our credit card accounts. Yikes, how am I going to be able to do this?? I keep telling myself it's the best thing to do to get this off our shoulders. I have learned my lesson here and have made a promise never to go out and get every single credit card offered to me. Once we are debt free, we will have one credit card for emergencies and we have decided to have a limit of $1,000. If anyone in interested in this program, please feel free to e-mail me: shaninspring@yahoo.com
Best wishes to all of you, I know it's not easy!
Best wishes to all of you, I know it's not easy!
