Using Fiona to pay off credit card debt

Money Management
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Will using this hurt my credit score. Credit cards will be paid off, however, how do the credit companies look at this?

Thanks for any input.

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It depends on which score you’re

looking at. Every sector has its own algorithm it seems. example: a car loan will pull a different fico vs a home loan

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It may affect your score in some cases since it will now be considered a loan rather than credit card debt. But I don’t know that it would be enough to make it a bad decision.

In this case, other things such as your debt to income ratio would be relatively the same and therefor should not affect your credit score that much.

Companies like Fiona tend to promote themselves as being a great debt consolidation option but I would still recommend doing the research to find out what people who have actually used the service have to say.

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Thank you.

5

Using a debt consolidation company has it’s pluses and minuses. Usually debt consolidation companies pay your debt and charge you interest. The debt paid off is great. The interest in the long run will basically cost you more than the debts themselves. I personally don’t care for them myself. I’d rather pay the debts off by either snowball method(paying debts of the lowest amount, then taking the freed up money of the previous lowest debt and applying it to the next lowest debt)or the other method(God I can’t think of what it’s call for the life of me), you basically pay off the highest interest debt first and work down to lowest interest on debt, that method. Also too, if your debt is in collections, usually the debt collection agency will offer you a one time pay off lesser than the actual amount. And lastly, even if your debt is paid off it can stay on your credit report for up to 7 years. That’s my 2 cents on it.

Sincerely, Prince Alarming

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Prince_Alarming posted:

or the other method(God I can’t think of what it’s call for the life of me)

Avalanche method.

I was also curious about using a service like Fiona. And from what I learned, it won’t do a hard pull on your credit, so it shouldn’t hurt your score just to use the service. Fiona just gets you rates for a few loans, as far as I understand it. If you decide to open a loan for consolidation, it will probably drop your score a little. I thought this review was pretty useful for Fiona: Here. Although I haven’t found many first account reviews so far.

Since I have a couple cards with INSANE interest rates, I would consider taking the slight drop to sign up for a loan with a lower rate, honestly. (25-28% vs something like 5-10% seems like a fairly even trade off.)

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I think that the best solution is to work more, or get a part-time job. From my experience, people seem to be able to visualize being debt-free more effectively, when they are working.