Should I refi now or wait?

[FlaDude]

I'm looking for advice regarding refinancing. I've got most of 60k of debt that is either on credit cards or loans that I got to refi cards. About a year and a half ago a few long ago late payments dropped off my reports so I started a round of refi's. At the time I was paying almost 1k/month in interest. Between a $10k Marcus loan at 6%, a $20k Prosper loan at 7% + 3% orig, and a $7k BOA card at 0% for 18 months I cut the interest about in half. Over the last year I've also reduced my balance by 5k, and would have done better if not for a couple of unexpected expenses totalling 10k (mainly a new AC for the house). 

I'm starting another round of refinancing with a goal of getting below $200/month interest. Since my wife has a FICO of around 825 (but little income), we're using her score to help mine. We got her a Citi with $10.5k @ 0% for 18 months and paid off a 3 of my cards and a huge chunk on another, this brings my util down from 35% to under 24%. Unfortunately, the transfers went through right after the reporting date for 3 of the cards so I'll be waiting for at least a couple of weeks longer for my scores to reflect this. Everything is now at 7% interest or less, except for Chase Amazon $10K @17% and a $6k @ 10% loan from Service Finanace to replace the air conditioner on my house.

My plan was to wait for the new balances to report and then see what kind of offers I could get, but on a whim I checked CK for pre-approvals and Lending Club came back with $10k for 3 years at 6.57% APR and $304 payment. I know they charge an origination fee, but I think it must be pretty low. They payment is about right for an interest rate of 6%, so the APR to interest spread is fairly small.

My FICO was 730 last month before the transfer, and went to 739 with $2k balance reduction for the transfer reporting and not much other activity. Any guesses regarding where it will end up when the other $8k reports? One of the cards I paid off was at about 93% UTI, and the Amazon card is around 97%. I have one other card (BOA) at around 80% and the rest are fairly low. The real question is should I take the LC offer now and pay off Amazon or wait 2-3 weeks in hopes of something better?

Once I get Amazon taken care of, I might refi the 10% loan, I haven't decided on that yet. My BOA 0% promo rate expires next March so I'll probably look for another 0% BT offer then.

On another topic, the CK pre-approval page said I'd get no phone calls, but 30 seconds after checking my offers, Lending Point called to follow up, which was somewhat annoying. Their offer on the CK page was at 25% interest, but they said they might be able to do better. Of course, I told them no thanks.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

[RonM21]

You have a lot going on here, but I'll take a crack at it lol. If you are okay with refinancing now, based on what you see with your profile, then I say go ahead with it. Cutting your interest in half again would be a benefit. The key obviously would be not adding more debt whether you refi or not. That can become a dangerous cycle that is hard to get out of, adding on to your debt.
As for CK amd their offers, I have never personally gone off of anything they are saying. So, I don't know how that works. Because they aren't using Fico scores, I don't put much stock into anything on their site except the actual credit report info.

[FlaDude]

---

@RonM21 wrote:
You have a lot going on here, but I'll take a crack at it lol. If you are okay with refinancing now, based on what you see with your profile, then I say go ahead with it. Cutting your interest in half again would be a benefit. The key obviously would be not adding more debt whether you refi or not. That can become a dangerous cycle that is hard to get out of, adding on to your debt.
As for CK amd their offers, I have never personally gone off of anything they are saying. So, I don't know how that works. Because they aren't using Fico scores, I don't put much stock into anything on their site except the actual credit report info.

---

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I plan to refi the $10k Amazon before the end of the year in any case, I'm just not sure whether I should pull the trigger right away while I have a decent offer, or wait for better since I expect a score bump by the end of the month. I hear you about the cycle of debt, I've been in it for over 20 years. My debt was almost 75k a couple of years ago, so I'm working it down. Reducing interest really seems to help. My wife and I are both on-board now with not running up the cards, and one advantage of getting loans is that we can't run them back up. Once I get past the March BT I plan to close at least a couple of cards, but I want to do that in a measured way to avoid quickly increasing the UTI.

I found the Marcus loan via CK, and the Prosper loan was either from CK or Nerdwallet. So far the pre-approved offers I've gotten from them have worked out, so hopefully that will continue.

[RonM21]

Sounds like you have it under control and the debt is decreasing with time. Keep going that direction as you have been and you should be fine. Best of luck to you!

[FlaDude]

As a follow up, my FICO only went up about 15 points after getting my UTI from 35% to under 25, paying one card down from over 90% to under 10%, paying another down from 97% to 88%, and paying off a couple of small balances. I had been hoping for better than that. My Vantage score (useless, I know) went up over 30 points.

I checked again on CK and with a couple of other pre-approved offers in the mail and the best offer was still the same, Lending Club for $10k/3years at 5.9% with a 1% origination fee (6.57 APR). One interesting think to note was that interest rate required direct payments to credit cards of at least $6000, the rate was about half a point higher otherwise. For now I had them pay 7k directly to the cards and put the rest into my bank to provide a holiday cushion until I get my annual bonus in mid January, then I'll pay the other 3k to my cards.