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I would ask a few more questions about why you are interested in this:

1) Do you have some emergency funds saved up so you are no longer adding to your CC debt?

2) Are you planning to start paying off this debt and not wanting to just "extend" the length of the debt?

We did this once through our bank that had our car loan. We had to have collateral for the amount of the loan (we used our other vehicle) and we got it paid off so much faster and at a lower interest rate. It was nice.

@Nskillet: I guess what I mean about "emergency fund savings" is that until you have a bit of savings for emergencies you will continue to default to using debt for emergencies.

Debt consolidation (meaning, through a debt consolidation company) can have a large *negative* effect on your credit, similar to if you declared bankruptcy, depending on what you’re talking about doing. The way many of those companies work is that they negotiate a settlement (of interest rate terms or the amount you owe) and then have your account closed by the lender. Both “closed by lender” and “debt settlement” are huge black marks on a credit report, and will stay on your report for 7 years. Its one of those “little” facts that those companies are not often willing to tell you about!

Snowballing often won’t have immediate results, especially depending on your debts and how much you can pay towards the top debt each other (whether your snowballing technique is to start with lowest $$ first or highest APR first). It isn’t a quick solution (unless you have a ton of tiny debts), but it does work.

I would highly recommend checking out the forums at myfico.com. They are full of legit people who have paid down debt, saved, rebuilt credit, etc. I would avoid debt consolidation at all costs, same as I would bankruptcy.

ETA: If, depending on your credit and assets, you can acquire a loan to pay off the debts and “consolidate” that way, that’s a better option, but beware that that will also impact your credit score, because it will be a new debt you’re taking on. I would only take out a new loan to pay off old loans if I cut up the cards so they could not be used, had emergency savings so I didn’t have to put any new charges on the card, and the interest rates were dramatically better. In general, I don’t think it makes sense to take out new loans to pay off old loans, especially if your spending habits and/or income haven’t really changed.

@Nskillet: we have just completed the process of doing this, although with school debt (lines of credit) and attached it to our home equity. It's amazing! We save 1200 a month in payments. We just did it through our regular bank. Our interest rates varied on the credit products we did have from prime +. 5 to 22 percent interest, and now our interest is fixed at 2.97 percent. We love having only one payment a month as well. I think the main thing with debt/credit/money is that there is no one way to do it correctly, so you have to find what works best for you guys! For us, we're spendy with credit, so we eliminated all open credit, except we share one credit card with a 500 limit. My husband can't save, and I like to hoard stacks of money when I have some to hoard, so we transferred all the living expenses to him, and I have all the savings products in my name. It took us about 6 years of trying out different things to come up with something that worked for us!

@Nskillet: I took out a personal loan through the bank to pay off credit card debt. It made the payment much more manageable and it brought my credit score up higher because I paid regularly and on time.

If you do not have budgeting down you can fall back into using credit cards.

I also found it was harder to find personal loans, banks are not really giving them out anymore.

Good luck!

I did not do a loan but we did credit counseling/consolidation to pay down my husband's credit card debt. I would highly recommend it. It helped us immensely.

I don't know what the exact status of your debt is, but I would encourage you to look into the marital property laws of your state and the status of your credit cards (i.e. read the terms of your card) before making any decisions. This isn't about whether you guys divorce or split up. If you or your husband have a credit card where the debt was accrued before marriage or even primarily before marriage, or if one of the cards was primarily used to benefit one of you, or if only one of you is on the card, or if one of you is the account holder while the other is merely an authorized user, depending on where you live and what your credit card terms are, all of these things can impact whether you are liable for the debt upon the death of a spouse. When you consolidate the debt, you are both taking on each other's obligations as a new joint loan, so if one of you dies, you're still on the hook for the other's debt.

This is one of the reasons why DH and I did not do the marriage consolidation of our student loans (which turns all of our student loans to 1 payment) and instead separately consolidated our individual loans (and thus have 2 payments). That way, if God forbid one of us dies, the other isn't on the hook for our debts and have to spend our life insurance settlement or drain the estate to pay off the dead spouse's loans.

What about transferring some of the balances to another card? Basically what @yellowbird: said.