Gail, we love your show and watch it religiously in Australia.  My wife and I earn approximately $160,000 per annum. We currently have a mortgage, a few credit cards, personal loans and a car loan.  We have recently been toying with the idea of consolidating everything into a 100% home loan, with a family member providing a limited guarantee for the amount above 100% of our home loan valuation.  This amount would be approximately $60,000. We are currently paying some $5,000 per month for our monthly debt repayments.  This is not the minimum, we pay more.  With the new loan arrangement, the minimum repayment would be some $3,300.  We would continue to pay the $5,000 per month to this.  Do you think this sounds like a good idea?

If you guys earn $160,000 a year, how did you manage to rack up all that debt? Or is it mostly mortgage? You haven’t broken it down, so I can’t tell, but $5,000 a month for debt repayment is a crap-load of money. I hope you’ve taken a good hard look at your spending and are cutting waaaaay back on the non-essentials.

Any steps you take to reduce your interest costs are okay with me. The fact that you don’t intend to reduce your payments so you’ll pay off the debt faster is another point in favour of this plan.

Now, if your family member had written me to ask if (s)he should be guaranteeing your loan, I would have said, “ARE YOU NUTS!”  So pray they don’t find my site.