“To everything there is a season….”
There is a reason, time, and life cycle to have mortgage debt.
Other consumer debt is ugly and expensive.
There are two predominant schools of thought:
1) Pay off debt faster by your own means. You got yourself into this situation; now pay the price to get out. Get a part time job, cut back expenses, and reduce life style.
a. Use this credit card calculator to find out how long your debts will last.
2) Consolidate debt into your home mortgage.
a. Pro’s: it’s less painful, providing you have equity.
i. You must have a process to capture the monthly savings that does not allow those dollars to reach your check book first.
b. Con’s: if your habit’s don’t change…you’ll be back in the same situation sooner than you imagine, and will be paying off debt the old fashioned way.
i. If the captured monthly payments are not redirected into savings or other debt elimination (mortgage), you have converted “short(er) term debt” to “long term” debt.
True Life Case Analysis:
Time to Payoff Credit Cards with Minimum Monthly Payments:
Chase = 73 months
Bk of America = 49 months
Chase #2 - = 67 months
Misc Cards = 38 months
The Next Questions:
1) How much additional cash can be added to the existing monthly payments, in the right order, to accelerate the pay off of each credit card?
2) How realistic is it that I do this from existing (or newly created) cash flow?
3) Do I have the discipline to do this for the length of time it will take to pay off all my debt?
If your answers are positive, a Debt Consolidation is not necessary for you.
If your response is negative, a debt consolidation is worth reviewing.
Here are two AFTER debt consolidation choices where the new payment saved $512.00 per month.
It’s interesting to note, that in the above case, my client was comfortable making the higher payments, they just couldn’t eliminate the credit cards as fast as they wanted to.
So, keeping the same monthly payment and “capturing” the $512.00 per month savings gives them two nice choices: pay off the mortgage in 13.17 years and save $114,310.00 in interest OR accumulate savings of $47,000.+ in 7 years and save enough to write a check to pay off the mortgage balance in 14.92 years.
Which is best for you? Complete the form and send it over for a review.