Welcome to Part Six of a 6-part series (aka, the last post) I’m doing on personal loans, credit card debt, and refinancing – the Payoff Series. If you’re new here, go back and check out Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five!
Well, I did it. I paid down $12,607.16 between May 16, 2016 and November 30, 2017. And you know what? It feels great.
I didn’t quite get it paid off by my birthday (which is in July), but I still got it done 6 months earlier than planned. And while most financial advisors wouldn’t recommend personal loans for credit card debt, using Payoff’s personal loan to refinance such a large sum of credit card debt was a great help.
With Payoff, I was able to make equal, monthly payments and treat the loan as just that, another loan. I didn’t see the finance charges adding up each month or the new total every time I logged into my online bank account. Plus, as with all loans, I had a set end date – no matter what, my loan was going to be paid in full by May 2018; that’s a nice safety net to have.
So, would I recommend using a personal loan to refinance your debt? Absolutely, but with a caveat. Make sure you’re only doing this for truly large sums of money. I was drowning in interest pre-refinancing because of my $11,000 of credit card debt. As many of you know, I have one other credit card to payoff, but it only has ~$4000 on it and is something I’ll be able to manage on my own (& repay in 2018).
Payoff took the stress away and let me treat my credit card debt as if it were a student loan or car payment, and quite frankly, that was far more helpful than the fact that they also lowered my interest rate by 5%. An added bonus is that now that I’ve paid off the loan, I can snowball those debt payments into helping pay off the much smaller credit card (you’ll see me talk about that one in my 2018 resolution post) and refund my emergency fund.
Thank you for following my credit card journey with the Payoff Series. I am super excited to knock out the remaining credit card and start working on my savings goals. For even more information about paying off credit cards, check out this article, too.
-ECD
Have you repaid (or are working on it) ridiculous credit card debt? What worked, what didn’t, and how great does it feel to have the debt gone?