Comments on: Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card Debt

By: Insoledit.Com » Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card Debt

Insoledit.Com » Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card Debt — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:30:52 +0000

[...] (CWakaCL) wrote an interesting post today on Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card DebtHere’s a quick [...]

By: Bottea.Com » Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card Debt

Bottea.Com » Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card Debt — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:06:48 +0000

[...] wrote an interesting post today on Poll: Investing and Paying Credit Card DebtHere’s a quick [...]

By: Lazy Man

Lazy Man — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:19:49 +0000

I’ll take option C… use the money that you’ve been saving up with the $100 monthly investments, pay off as much (or all) of the $10,000 and then start again.

It sounds sad to start all over, but it’s the same effect of slowing down to pay off the $10,000 debt over a long time. It’s a lot better than paying all that compounding 18% interest.

By: Sun

Sun — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:38:02 +0000

When in debt, it makes sense to keep the investments that get the match intact and tightening the belt is necessary in order to get out of debt as quickly as possible. Now let me imagine a scenario. If you have, say, $10K in credit card debt and after some calculations, you decide to put $1000 toward debt payment while reducing your expenses to come up with
that amount of money. At the end of the month, you find you have $100 surplus in your account. What would you do with that $100? Pay debt or invest it since you already invested $100 a month before acquiring the
debt? After the debt is paid off, you find that now you can live on the exact amount of income and the same budget when you were in debt, but you have $1000 now after all the necessary expenses are taken care off.
What would you do with that $1000? Invest all of them or part of it (so you go from $100 monthly investment before to, for example, $500) and use the rest to do things that you have skipped when you were paying the
debt?

By: SavingDiva

SavingDiva — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:09:24 +0000

In your situation, I would try to scale back and keep up my investing. However, if I acquired a lot of credit card debt, I would scale back my spending, stop my investments (except for my matching 401k retirement plan), and try to get the cc debt paid off as quickly as possible. Then I would try to stick with the lower spending while cranking up my investments (to make up for the lost time).

I did find myself in a similar situation, but only $1k of credit card debt. I didn’t interrupt any automatic retirement savings, but I did empty out my EF and savings accounts to pay it off.

By: plonkee

plonkee — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:49:00 +0000

If I lost my job I would probably keep up the investment rationalising it by thinking that I could always access the investments in a real emergency.