“The light was not getting near”: how Minka saved on her repayments by consolidating her credit cards

Minka Marriott is 41, a graphic designer, single, and lives with a staffy cross in Belfield. Despite her debts, she earns good money, “I earn a good wage and I should be able to go out for like one dinner at least every couple of weeks with friends and family and not have to, you know, scrounge for what’s on sale at the supermarket,” she says.

Credit card debt on a good income

The debt itself was never that big. By her recollection it sat at around $6,000, across two credit cards, one Qantas and one NAB. “Which isn’t a huge amount but still when you’re paying for everything, like you know, everything else, it was just like it really cut into any sort of spending money that I had, which left me with nothing,” she says.

The credit cards weren’t funding a lifestyle, instead she needed them for necessities. “I wasn’t just buying stuff willy nilly. It was just a matter of surviving. So yeah, I kind of just had to rely on credit cards a little bit.”

Month after month the credit card debt remained. “It just felt like it was never coming down. It was like this road that was never ending. The light was not getting near.”

Her own summary of the position at the time: “a bit precarious”. The pressure affected her constantly. “There’s so much money going out and I just couldn’t even really live my life,” she says. “Even if, like, my dog got sick or something like that, like, I just couldn’t even afford to pay for it.”

“I kind of just woke up to the fact that I needed to do something about it.”

On the fence

She went looking for debt consolidation herself and found WeMoney, which showed her the breakdown of her new loan. “How much it would be consolidated down, how much interest I’d be paying at the end of it and what my monthly repayment would be,” she says. “So I just found that really easy and to use.”

She didn’t end up taking the loan when it was initially offered. “I was on the fence for a while and then I went through another month and I was just like, I can’t keep on doing this.”

Want to see your own numbers first? Try the WeMoney debt consolidation calculator for an estimate.

Finding relief

“I think I emailed the customer service, said, I would actually like to take you up on this,” she says. “And it was simple. So I didn’t really have to do much again to go through it all.”

The consolidation came to about $10,000, more than the credit cards, because big bills had landed at the same time. “I had to pay some other things that I just didn’t even know how I was going to pay for them if I didn’t get this consolidation,” she says. “So it just would have gone on the credit card.”

“I didn’t have to make the payment, so it just went straight to where I needed it to go,” she says. “And it was just nice to just see those, you know, numbers just go to zero.”

“I felt a lot of relief. Thank God for that.”

“The following month, it was just this tiny little amount that came out,” she says. Her old repayments ran to “nearly five, six hundred dollars or something like that” a month. “So now I’m down to 100.”

“Like an entire mountain had been lifted from my shoulders, if that makes sense.”

The relief and the saving are separate things. The saving, so far, is cash flow: several hundred dollars a month that went out across different repayments now stays in her account, and one $100 repayment leaves each month. What the loan costs her in total is another question; she signed on “for so many years”, and that number never came up. The relief surprised her more than the maths did. “I think what was unexpected, how relieved I actually felt,” she says.

Stress-free and saving

“Well, it pretty much removes the stress,” she says.

The sense of money slipping away has gone too. “Like I was just like it fell through my fingers, so it just made me feel so relieved,” she says. “I felt like I could actually take a deep breath and, you know, I know everything was going to be okay.”

The concrete change is the one she keeps returning to: one $100 repayment a month where five or six hundred used to go out, and room in her pay for the first time in a long while. “I actually could survive on what I’m being paid and still enjoy and be able to save and, you know, plan to go do things in the holidays and stuff like that,” she says. “Not having to say no, but being able to go, oh, yeah, I can do that now.” And the money that used to scatter across all those different places? “It’s completely different. It’s like, now I save all that money.”

See what consolidating could look like for you

If your repayments are scattered across cards and it feels like the balance never moves, it can help to see the numbers in one place. Try the WeMoney debt consolidation calculator for an estimate of what a single repayment could look like, then download the WeMoney app to get a view based on your actual situation.

Disclaimer: Minka’s experience is her own and is not a guarantee of a similar result. The information in this article is general in nature and was prepared for information purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Consider whether it is appropriate for your circumstances and seek independent advice before making a financial decision.