I’ve just taken out a personal loan to try to get a handle on my credit card balance. I feel weirdly elated that one debt has been ‘wiped out’ even though I’m fully aware that this new debt will need to be repaid…
How do you all cope and manage your debt?
The tedious old spreadsheeting and budgeting approach, sadly.
The two things that really worked for me were:
It was bonus month with my most recent paycheque so I’ve just cleared my overdraft and paid off a big chunk of my credit card. These will now slowly get used to the point where they will need clearing/paying a big chunk off around the same time next year.
FINALLY cleared my credit cards this year. I was able to do this mostly through a large gambling victory from the other month.
From now on I’m only going to ‘borrow’ money from my savings and pay it back that way (although we all know this won’t happen will it).
Still living at the edge of my overdraft every month
Credit card at max
Loan still has another 2 years on it
No savings
My overdraft and credit card limits are both very low though so it’s not that bad.
Quite poorly, but coping
Got around £4k on a credit card that I make the minimum payments on, but no extra to make in roads into it. I know I should consolidate it onto one card, but shrugs
Don’t have any (sorry). A combination of being strictly taught to not get credit plus some fairly fortunate pieces of luck in my life means I’m doing fine (at the moment).
Quite well
I did take out a large financing contract and it has affected my credit score. Guessing I need to make a couple of payments before it begins to improve. Not sure how it works
Got a £1500 overdraft that I’m at the limit of, £450 on a credit card (maxed), and last month I took out a payday loan (£600) to get through. Will now be repaying that at £180 a month, whilst also being £600 short every month.
Any ideas most welcome. Considering selling a kidney/lung.
Taking out new credit will negatively impact your credit ‘score’ for around six months, after which time it will improve again as long as you’re meeting all of your payments on time. The other factor is how much of your available credit you are using, so a person with three credit cards that aren’t maxed out will have a better score than a person with one credit card that is maxed out.
I really recommend signing up to credit expert (Experian) to monitor your credit report if you’re looking to improve your credit score.
How’s your credit score? If possible I would look into a 0% balance transfer credit card and see if you can transfer the loans etc on to that and then pay off as much as you can. The downside is that you’ll need a good credit score to be able to get a 0% transfer.
apologies if you’ve already done this, but if things are that bad you should definitely speak to someone like Step Change (https://www.stepchange.org/how-we-help/debt-advice.aspx)
they might be able help stop the interest/get your creditors to agree to token payments whilst you sort yourself out
Thank you
Barclaycard provide me with a credit score from Experian every three months. It’s not a full credit report, but simply a score.
At the moment the direct debit is arranged from my personal current account. Will transferring this to a join account positively affect my credit score?
If you have no pre-existing conditions and are not taking regular medication then you should be OK. Not sure where you’re based but worth googling for Clinical Trials near you (in London the big ones are Paraxel, Flu camp) - also depends how flexible your working situation is as I did a lot of mine working from my hospital bed.