Do You Suffer From Charge Card Misery?

I was watching the channel station the other day to see what was on TV and an ad came on that peaked my interest. It was a Credit Counseling ad that was showing people what charge cards really cost. I did not take down the payments and information at the time but decided to do a little review of the impact on my own.

The following is based on a $10,000 credit card debt and what the payments and end costs really are.

1. $10,000 at 18%, a typical card rate, when you make a minimum monthly payment of $145 and DO NOT CHARGE ANYTHING MORE to the card. After 5 years you would have paid approximately $8600 in interest and $32.55 off your balance. Continuing at $145 per month you would take about 35 years to pay that card off in full. You don’t want to know what interest you paid during that period!

2. If you did the same thing – no more charging – and paid $250 per month you would be paid off in 5 years and the interest cost would be about $5,000.

3. If you rolled your $10,000 credit card debt in with your mortgage at today’s rate of approximately 4% and increased your existing mortgage payment by $185, the debt would be fully paid in 5 years but the interest cost would be just over $1,000 resulting in a saving of about $4000. The cost to re-mortgage would be new legal fees of about $700-800 resulting in savings of several thousand dollars. After the 5 years if you continued with the higher payment you would also end up paying your existing mortgage off long before the original amortization.

If you have more charge card debt, the savings are even greater by converting the debt to your mortgage. If you would like me to review your personal situation feel free to email me at neil@mortgageman.ca or call me at 250-861-8758 and I would be pleased to analyze your affairs.

An added benefit might be that a re-write of your mortgage to a lower rate could also be possible. This could be true even if you have no outside debt to look at. My service for this analysis is “FREE”!