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.