Consolidate or Just Keep on Paying...
I used a variety of methods to pay off my college credit card debt, but I didn't become successful until I used the "snowball" method. It took awhile, but that was the THING that worked for me. When I paid off the first card, the momentum of the event helped me keep going. Each time a card was paid off, I had more money to contribute to the next card in line, so it was easy to see the balances decreasing and the progress I was making.
When I got married, new credit cards and loans were brought into the equation. My husband's credit cards were a little bit more serious than mine, many were over the limit and charging a fee each month because of it... the loan payments were more than what we could comfortably afford on top of living expenses. Not to mention, graduating college meant I had a new stack of student loans to pay on each month. The snowball method didn't seem like it was going to work fast enough to help us breathe, so we looked into debt consolidation.
We were trying to decide whether or not a debt consolidation loan was better than to just keep on making payments and hope that we started seeing some results from the efforts. We considered debt consolidation loan companies, debt counseling, taking a loan from my husband's 401K to pay off the debt, or taking a home equity loan.
It was not an easy decision, although I was certain we weren't making enough money to make any advancements in paying the debt off ourselves. We also had no way to increase the income at the time, as we had two small children at home and were both working full time (he at a job and me from a home office with kids pulling me around the office in my chair on wheels....)
I don't think we made the right decision now, looking back, but we ended up doing a combination of a 401K loan and a home equity loan- because neither offered enough to pay off all the stuff. In fact, even doing both meant keeping some of my school loans separate, which made sense at the time because of their super low interest rates. We ended up with two larger monthly payments instead of about 18, smaller, individual ones (each with their own interest rates) so overall- it was a good move.
The problem is our house is now maxed out. If we needed or wanted to sell it, we would barely get what we owe for it. The other issue is a portion of my husband's weekly pay goes to pay back his 401K loan each week, which reduces our income level a bit and also means the 401K balance isn't earning what it might if it had all the money in there. (Not to mention the penalty we paid on our taxes for taking the loan!)
If you can pay every month and you see that the balances are decreasing from your payments - I would say that's probably your best option. But if you find that you can only send the minimum amounts or your income doesn't seem to stretch far enough... you might want to consider debt consolidation of some kind.
