Submitted by Finally_ t3_11dkndz in personalfinance
Hi,
I will start by saying: Yes I was bad with money. I had a few large expenses (wedding mainly) which I put on some credit cards and transferred to 0% APR cards... currently this is split between 2x 10k balances across two banks. In the past year I've cut down my extra spending (items, wants, dining out/delivery, etc) by quite a bit and I'm starting to get in a better place
One of these 10k balances the term the 0% offer is about to expire so I need to move the balance in the next 2-3 months.
I make roughly 125k a year, and put around 10k into my 401k. Before last year I was putting in 100% for 6 years since I started working. My wife and I split rent, I pay 1500 for my portion. credit score of 765 going up/down by 10pts every few months. After normal expenses (high CoL, SF area) and paying down roughly 1k in the above cards, I have essentially 0 in my bank every pay period. This really does stress me out, but I can manage for another year and half or two years if needed...
I'm looking at CC debt loans and getting offers of almost 10% APR for a 36month 20k loan which works out to being around 3500 in interest.
Continuing to open 12m/18m CC's in the next few weeks seems to be the cheapest option I can see (end up paying 3%-5% transfer fee one time, so a total of ~1k). But, is there a better option for me?
nozzery t1_ja97b1a wrote
Don't mistake the situation, you still are bad with money if you make $125k (plus whatever your wife makes) and you are scrambling trying to pay this off by rolling 0% offers. This is a valid strategy, but, it seems like you would be better served dedicating income to pay this off, or at least have that amount on the side earning 5% ready to pay off whenever you want, but if you're only putting 10k into your 401k, it doesn't seem like you've prepared to pay this off at all, ever. Dangerous