Need Advice â?? Coming To Terms With CC Debt Long story short: My wife was unable to work for two years because of a delayed spinal neck injury from a car accident. We had just gotten a new mortgage, and while I paid it and the bills from my income, our credit card usage (food, clothing, medical treatment, etc..) skyrocketed. After three years, we have about $26,000 in unsecured CC debt. Iâ??ve tried to â??balance transferâ? our way out of this but those days look long gone. Now with interest rates climbing, credit lines being lowered and two of my cards ending their 0% ride, I know the charade is over. Could someone point me in the right direction here? I feel really anxious these days. Thanks
Put all your assets down on a paper and all your debts.. It seems you are already seeing the writing on the wall. Bankruptcy might be viable for you and your wife. WOofer
Thanks... I forgot to mention that my wife made a good recovery and is working again. Our card usage is down to "emergency only". We have no "lates" and over 700 credit scores. I'd hate to have to file given the damage our credit reports would undergo. Still, maybe you're right?
CMpsr, so you are current on all your bills with no lates? and the problem is it is just too much debt and you are afraid you won't be able to handle it much longer before things start slipping into lates?
Yes exactly. The interest (roughly 11%) on 26k adds about $230 a month to an already stretched lifestyle. That leaves paying the minimum + interest. We obviously made progress in paying down the balance when both cards were at 0%, and we've budgeted utilities, food and necessities to a minimum. However at 39k yearly, it just doesn't seem like we'll ever get out. She's not 100% yet, and just yesterday, my podiatrist suggested limiting my hours due to needed foot surgery, which if I went ahead with, would put me off work for three months. Every month seems like a balancing act. I'm sure others know what I'm talking about.
I've been in your situation and what I would do now is look at all your posessions and sell them. I'm sure you can make a HUGE dent in that 26k if you sold off everything. The only material things you need are a bed, a refridgerator, and your house. Even consider downgrading the bed if you have a nice one. Trust me being debt free with a great credit score is a whole lot better than getting lates and damaging your credit. You are in a great position right now. do the right thing and save your credit. You and your family will bounce back from this. good luck.
I second selling off things or even getting a second part time job. While I do feel some people should do bankruptcy I don't think this person needs to do so as just this one debt.... Well he an negotiate with the credit card company maybe...Who is it? Then the other thing is when he does not pay for three months they will start to want to negotiate and then of course if it goes to a C and or JDB they will negotiate for a lot less IMO and IME. Now to get back to basics to try to pay this debt. Get rid of your cable and or just do basic... Look to getting a cheaper monthly phone bill. MANY times if you call a company they have a *new* account where you will get a cheaper bill. I just did this with my VErizon land line phone. Same service but $20 bucks less a month. ALso many people are now just either having their cell phones as their phone and or ONLY having a land line for local calilng which is very cheap! I used to go to blockbuster and had a an account at netflicks,and don't do wither any more and go to the library and get the movies for free! Same with books. Now I used to buy a hard cover book at least once a month sometimes once a week well that adds up.. Same with subscriptions and buying magazines.It is amazing how muh you can save. I am positive that you can save at least 50 bucks a week just by not buying bottled water, the newspaper, and bringing your own lunch to work ; ) I don't need to watch how much I spend any more as I am out of debt, BUT youkonw what? I don't miss HBO, I don't miss getting that movie in the mail, AND I definitely don't miss spending$30 bucks on a book and then either have to store it or give it away. BTW I did get a lot of my books together, and novels were a buck paperbacks 25 cents. I put adds on craigs list.. Just yesterday I put ads in for summer reading.. $10 box of books... A small TV great for a cottage with DVD $20 bucks, and an outdoor patio set, and several pieces of furniture. Sold them all within the day and profited a nice 500 bucks. Oh yes I love to go to garage sales and am an early bird... One of the pieces of furniture I sold for 100 b ucks yesterday I bought for $5 bucks on Saturday! So I think there are a lot of things one can do to make extra money. Oh and one more thing, if you are good at teaching how to run a computer, great with dogs, as many people need dog walking and or care while at work, have free time to run errands, there is SUCH a need for any of these services. I set up a cousin in a dog walking business and he went to not much and HATING his job to making about $50 an hour and LOVING his business.Thing is it is nice to save money, better not to watch so much tv and also to ahve a nest egg of all the money you have accumulated by NOT having HBO buying that new book, doing lunch out... NOt to say that you should live the life of a hermit, but little things add up.. Anyway good luck! Woofer
Ditto what woofer said. Cancel the cable. Eat at home. Take lunch to work. Read your newspapers and magazines at the library, and cancel subscriptions. See if you can get a second job for a little while. Sell some of the stuff you have but don't need.
Hedwig It really is something how much you have that you do not want and or need. Since I last posted I just sold a bunch of perennials at $5.00 a pot where at the garden center they would be at least $15.00 and not as great as mine are. YOu really have to think about what people would buy and what you want to get rid of. I Love the feeling when I clean out a cupboard or the barn and have more room , and of course more room for more stuff. HAHHAHAHA Woofer
How about keep the cable, ditch the phone company entirely and go to Wal-Mart and get a Magic Jack? $20 a year instead of even that much a month!!! You get all the bells and whistles you are getting now and maybe even more. I have two of them. Although any old phone will work you definitely need to use cordless phones with them. If you don't have a 5gig cordless you need to get one with caller I.D. on it. I have two of them and one has a top of the line high dollar Radio Shack cordless on it and the other has a plain old push button phone. There is a world of difference in how they perform. I use call forwarding on both of them and forward each to a separate cell phone. Of course, the cell phones do make the whole thing much more expensive. I actually have 3 cell phones but I'm sure you won't need but one. If you want to cut down on cell phone bills and have Cricket in your area then I'd recommend you switch to Cricket but don't buy their most expensive phone as I did. Their best phone is a slider that is supposed to give you unlimited internet but trying to use a cellphone for internet surfing really sucks but the Cricket internet is so bad saying that it sucks don't even begin to describe how bad it is. I like craigslist a lot too but I've never sold anything on craigslist. I just use it to buy things once in a while. I subscribe to several of their listings via RSS so I don't have to go through the pain of actually having to log on to their web site. I use a 16 gig USB Sandisk Cruzer thumb drive for emails and RSS feeds. The Cruzer has Thunderbird on it and that handles unlimited emails and RSS feeds. I don't worry about losing emails to computer or hard drive crashes anymore that way and I can use the thumb drive on any computer anywhere I go. It also has Firefox and other great programs on it and you can add even more. The 16 gig Cruzer is only $34 at Wal-Mart. I just wear it on a leash around my neck. I dug up a nice piece of my back yard last year and put in a garden. It didn't do much last year because I didn't get started until the first part of May but I started planting at the first part of March this year and things are really looking up. Covered the strawberries with a thick layer of straw last fall and they are doing great this year. I added lots of potatoes, corn, grapes and some other things this year. I'm learning quite a few tricks from a friend of mine and I'll do even better next year. I'm spending more than I'll get out of it now but once you get your garden tools bought it will begin to pay off over time. If you have a big enough garden you can sell produce at flea markets or just out on some empty lot and make great money that way too. I'll never get that much garden in but it will produce some great eating.
There is nothing better than to take something that you grew from YOUR garden and eat it. MMMMMMmmmmmmm Woofer
Woofer i have a dog that love's veggies,green beans,potato peelings,carrots,etc,she would rather have that then her hamburger meal.So i wouldn't have her guard my garden.lol
Well my dogs LOVE anything I eat. They will eat fruit too and watermelon is their fav, and carrots are like cookies to them. Good for you giving your dog veggies! I don't know what it is but my dogs will not grab anything to eat. I could have steaks on the grille and noone around, ice cream in a dish, chocolate in the car. They are just so good ; ) Woofer Proud Mother...
I had to wrestle with my lab to get my T-bone back,My terrier did a run by snatch of a burger off the grill.my terrier loves watermelon,apples,grasshoopers an once in a while some kind of insect,when we first got her she would small sticks and grass because someone was straving her.
I also have a large amount of CC debt (about the same as yours). Some of it I was able to get locked at reasonable rates for life, but a large bulk of it was 0% interest and expiring in the next month or so. I also found no way to transfer these balances, and was at wit's end (selling stuff on EBay, but that only lasts so long.) I used to get blank checks with promotional rates practically every week, but as you mention those days have disappeared. My wife called the CC company (she's better at these sorts of calls than me), and was able to get through to a great lady who offered to close our CC accounts and put us on a payment program. She said our credit would not be negatively impacted (not that I really care, I just wanted to avoid 20+% interest rate on $15K debt), and our monthly payments will be very reasonable. They will be automatically deducted from my bank account. She said that they were able to work with us because we have always been current with our payments (I set up automatic online payments to stay on top of things.) Needless to say I slept much better that night. I've read of such programs before, but don't know too much about them. I would say it's worth a shot to call them and explain everything. I am pretty certain that there are certain conditions that must be met before get to talk to the right person, but again I think our situations are very similar. PM me if you would like more details, I just found this board randomly today and registered to post a response since our situations are similar.
If its through the cc company who holds the debt that is one way out and with neg reporting other then its closed is a pretty good deal.
