Should I repay my debt or try to settle?

[Anonymous]

Hello, I made a bunch of bad decisions with my credit cards and now I'm in a hole.. I'm 32 years old with pretty good credit 740 and work 2 jobs. My monthly income is 4k a month for two jobs (take home). Should I try to debt snowball this debt or should I try to miss payments for a while and try to settle for half? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Credit card debt : 41k between 6 cards.
Auto loan: 16k

[Gramz]

Welcome to the Forum,

1. Do you have any miss payments on the credit cards.  If you do not I would not miss any payments, just pay the minimum balance on each card.

2. It is you debt and you have to clean it up, regardless if you let it default and settle it will be on your credit report.  Paying it off earlier will only help with you credit.

So roughly you got $6,833 on each card(I know this is not the case).  I would attack them credit cards, paying down the lowest balance to the highest, used your tax return if you getting any back to put towards your debt.  It might take a while but you can clean this up. 

I wouldn't really worry about my auto loan at this time.  If you let any of those cards go into collection it will take a direct hit on your credit.

This is just my opinion and what I would do.  I did not have 41K in credit card debt, but I did have over 35K in debt and I'm down to 20K total debt with about 6K in CC which I am planning to clear up in the next 2 months.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for replying, no I have not miss any payments yet.. I'm just thinking ahead. If I don't file bankruptcy and don't settle, would there be any negative effect at all if I called each creditor and asked for a financial hardship repayment plan?