Comments pro or con?

I'm looking for a second mortgage to pay the CC's with, but I don't want my credit run 57,000,000 times in the process.....

Zaphod,

No judgements, but you have gotten rid of all your CC's haven't you?

The bills don't really get any smaller, and you wil have *another* loan to pay off.

Have you tried negotiating with your creditors?  Most are rather amenable to the idea.  

Try to work out another payment plan, or reduce the interest by a couple of points.

And by all means, ditch the cards.

Oh, buddy, you ain't kiddin'!

This is the [b]third[/b] time I go around this loop, and it's my LAST! I'll now have THREE loans to pay, all of which cover CC bills run up over the last six years. As soon as they're paid, I'm keeping ONE for emergencies only, and DITCHING the rest somewhere very deep, dark, and completely unaccessible.

I hate those fucking things. Too bad I've had to learn it all the hard way, even after the lesson was taught twice over.

Edited to add: I'll friggin' declare BANKRUPTCY before I do this shit again!

I used them to refinace earlier this year. Pretty much all they do is get quotes from lenders based on what you say your credit rating should be. When you actually hook up with the people that do the paper work for the loan, they run the credit report.

Zaphod, that one kept for emergencies is going to do you in.

WHat they consider an emergency and what you ought to consider an emergency are two different things.

Your kid needing a kidney trasnplant is an emergency.

The refrigerator dieing and needing to be replaced is not an emergency (damn bad inconvience, yes).

Until you have 100% of your revolving loan debt paid, not another hting shoudl be placed on a CC, not even for emergencies (if you don't ahve a CC, you can't dig your hole any deeper).

Do you realize that the pizza you paid for with a credit card in 1995 is still being paid off, and it will have cost you around $400.00 when all is said and done?

I buy and sell money all day long, so I don;t really mind hearing the deep holes people have dug for themselves, but I hate to see a fellow AR15.commer in that particular hole.

Iuse them about a year ago. I thought it was easy, not alot of people to chase down, they did most of the calling, and you can see a comparison of a dozen or so companies that you can use to leverage them waiving fees against each other. I would recommend.

[lol] Oh, yes! I recognize that, and it makes me want to [puke].



Buddy, it's not a hole. It's a friggin' CRATER. To be frank, even keeping ONE card around makes me nervous. If I did keep it, I wouldn't even carry it around in my wallet. It'd buried in my gun safe along with the other important papers. Out of site, out of mind.

Oh, yeah! BUDGETING! THERE'S an idea! [thinking]

I'll also be looking for a second job to accelerate the payments. I may die from the stress, but at least I'll go down swinging.

To all you young guys and gals out there: DON'T USE YOU CREDIT CARDS! THEY ARE THE INCARNATION OF EVIL ON EARTH!

Of course, 99% of them will agree with me......and then run them up anyway before they even realize it. I certainly know how that feels... [:(]

Zaphod,

I agree with you 100% as to the evil inherent in CC's.  Especially for freedom loving folks like us, you use the CC and are enslaved to someone else for 20 years or so.

Take it easy on the repayments, if it is a "crater", your credit score is shot anyway, it will take 7 years to erase it anyway, might as well do it on your terms instead...no?

Take the smallest debt, apply everything extra you have to paying it off, then once that is paid off, take that origianl amount and again, anything you can scrape up to payoff the next debt, and so on.

If you do it right, you ought tobe out of your hole in 4 or 5 years, then you have 2 or 3 years of still bad credit score where you don;t have to worry about accumulating any more debt.  by the time 7 years is done, you will be out of the CC habit, and will operate on cash only.

Thats a sweet time.

All that money is yours, not owed to anyone else, then *you* get the power of compound interest working for you.

Hielo,

That won't work for me. Not enough cash flow. One of the things I've learned over the past few years is what bankruptcy REALLY means, and how completely unrelated it is to the AMOUNT of debt being held.

My credit is actually not bad. The amount of "bad" debt certainly hurts (and believe me, it's more than I make in a YEAR), but it's the INTEREST that's KILLING me! Also, since my first mortgage is private, having a mortgage payment on my credit report will actually HELP.

That being said, once I restructure the debt (sounding like Enron or K-Mart here) I plan on following your advice to pay off as much of the smaller-balance stuff as possible (my wife's car - 0% interest and less than $10K left, and the kid's pre-paid college fund). Right now it's all about cash flow.

Cash flow, cash flow, cash flow....

Edited to add: As for living without CC's, I plan on doing that just as soon as they are empty and GONE!

[pound]CC’s are no more ‘Evil’ then our ‘Black rifles’ are. It’s the person behind them that is the problem. They can be a powerful tool if used properly, and create carnage if abused. Think about it, where else can you get short term loans @0%? You just have to learn to use their rules in their game to your advantage.[toilet]

[i]Do you realize that the pizza you paid for with a credit card in 1995 is still being paid off, and it will have cost you around $400.00 when all is said and done?
[/i]

This should be made mandatory to be printed on credit cards, like that warning on smokes and booze.

I suppose that's true. It's just that they are so damnably EASY to lose control of....

At least an AR has a limited magazine capacity! [;D]

[b]SORRY[/b]...I accidentally clicked "yes" on the poll, because I thought it was just asking if anyone had ever [b]used[/b] them...not if you would [b]recomend[/b] them.

I got approved by them for a car loan once...they sent me a check for the amount, to take with me to the car lot.

I didnt end up using it though, because the Dodge dealer actually hooked me up with a better loan.

[b](BTW...this was 2 months after I had a chapter 7 bankruptcy discharged)[/b]

Zaphod,

I have had many customers that had tried to use Lending Tree and then came to me because they saw the exorbitant fees they were paying to get that low rate! I love Lending Tree![:D]

As far as your current CC debt, we need to look at the whole picture. A few questions;
1. What is the interest rate on your 'private' mortgage?
2. What is the term remaining on your 'private' mortgage and what is the payment without the taxes and insurance?
3. How much is the total CC debt that needs to be paid off?
4. What is your house currently worth?

With the answers to these questions, I can help to develop a plan that will be the best for you. Then you can take that plan and make it happen with a local mortgage broker and I will ride herd on them to make sure that you do not get taken.

If you would like, IM me or email me with the answers to these questions. If you want to talk about it, give me a call at 505-821-6748.

Wiggy,

IM inbound....

Great, I coulda used this advice a couple of months ago...  Actually I ran two of them up to about $9,500.00 but paid them off last October when I got my bonus and severance from being laid off.  Then I got a new job, two new 0% interest cards and ran them all up just this year because of the new baby, my wife's school and she doesn't work.  I did the lending tree thing about a week and a half ago and it's painless.  I was contacted by the lenders and SOME will run your credit first thing(someone told me they changed the law about checking credit and that you can get it checked without hurting your credit score).  It didn't work out for me because without my wife working the debt to income ratio was too high and they wouldn't accept her part time job's income.  But I would reccomend them.  

P.S.  The cards are in the garbage.