You might want to consider two options. Talk to your banker (loan officer) to see if you could get a personal loan with fixed rates and pay it off as fast as you can, and keep the CC for emergency only use or ask him/her about closing the CC account, freezing the rate and get another one, but personally I think that would not be good as CC interest rates are over 20% even with those with excellent credit. If you do get a loan, be sure you do not have a pre payment penalty clause in it. Your rate should be alot lower.

Here goes with my financial advice. I believe it's simpler than it sounds and just requires you to get your interest rates from all of your accounts in order to make your choices. First suggestion: do as celticmoon suggests and fix that $515K first mortgage immediately! As I'm sure you're aware, the fixed variable rates of now are worse than a year or two ago, but much better than the 12-19% that they were in the past. In my opinion, fix it now and pay for any closing costs out of your savings, which is presumably earning the worst interest rate. Speaking of....what savings rate is your $15K earning? If it's less than 9% (almost a sure bet), and you have liquidatable cash in assets (which you say you do) to cover an emergency fund, then using that cash to invest in your house is giving you a 9% rate of return in your house investment, which is far better than the 3-4% of a typical savings account. If you choose not to do that, then I present my second suggestion (which I still think you should consider, w/ or w/o the $15K in the equation) DH and I just went through a similar process, although with one house, and we paid off a motorcycle and a timeshare (each at ~9%), rather than CC debt. This plan mirrors our own, with different dollar amounts: Roll both HELOCs into one and LOCK your rate up now. In my opinion, it's only going to go up. You should be able to get a much better rate with a higher consolidation balance (we got 7.5% by consolidating our two loans along with our original HELOC). 65K + 30K = 95K = 11.9% of the first house or 19% of the second house. If you keep your loan:value ratio below 20%, you'll get a better deal on rates. You may even ben required to keep it below 20%; I'm not sure. Keep thinking about that. The next option is to add the 25K of CC debt into the HELOC figure, for a total of 65K + 30K + 25K = 120K = 15% of the first house. Close that loan and pay off the CC debt immediately. You're now transferring the 8.9% of wasted CC interest into an investment into your house, in addition to the tax writeoff. The last think to consider is to stick with the 95K HELOC option and pay off the CC bill with your assets. Are any of your stock or mutual funds giving you returns better than 9%? If so, then keep them where they are and do the 120K HELOC option. If they're earning less than 9%, then I refer you back to the concept of my second paragraph. If you take your mutual fund money that is earning less than 9% and pay down your worst mortgage/HELOC/CC rate with that, you're making a huge investment in your house. Now, if you want to sit on your stocks, that's understandable. I hope that my advice not confusing, and that it's helpful to you. Lindsay

I recently noticed some payments charged on my debit card that I traced to a magazine subscription company. However, when I called the company and gave them my address they said that they didn't have anything for that address. I NEVER use my debit card for transactions like this, so I called my bank to get my debit card number cancelled. Then I remembered a magazine subscription that I have been paying for for my daughter, and looked on the company's website using my daughter's address, and sure enough, there were about 4 new subscriptions for magazines going to her address. And the prices were much higher than if you subscribed directly. I called my daughter, and she told me that she thought that she was getting free subscriptions - that was the come on. She didn't read the teeny tiny print that said that if she did not act that the subscriptions would automatically renew, and that the original card charged (which was apparently my debit card) would be charged. That's not even the card that I am currently using to pay for the magazine that I initially subscribed to for her. What really maddened me is that the mag. sub. company would not give me any information about the charges until I came up with the address that they were going to. Even though it was my card being charged!!

kathsgrdn-"I just use my debit card to buy gas. " You might want to be little extra watchful when using your card at the pump. Here is one reason why I pay with cash. Happy Birthdayâ¦Iâve stolen $2500 from your account October 27th, 2008 by John Carroll Identity theft is a fast-growing problem, and Iâve taken it seriously for quite awhile. I pay to have people monitor my credit to ensure someone doesnât open accounts in my name, and I try to use temporary credit card numbers when I make online purchases. I shred personally identifiable information that I receive by mail, the better to deter âdumpster diversâ who might use it. Iâm also a stickler for using complex passwords on any site that provides access to financial information. There are many, many ways, however, to have your identity stolen, and though from hindsight this should have seemed an obvious possibility, it wasnât something that I had taken sufficient care to avoid. As the title of this post implies, someone managed to fraudulently withdraw $2500 from my bank account using an ATM card that was a clone of the one my wife and I have in our wallets (Iâm not sure whose card was the original source of the information). This was discovered the night before my birthday, and though I am sure to get all the money back (banks do insure for these kinds of things), it did mean that I spent all day Friday running around faxing, mailing, and filing police reports, which wasnât exactly the way I intended to spend the day. According to a detective at the West Hollywood Sherrifâs department, a group of individuals had apparently installed a device inside a gas station pump in the area. This device had access to all information entered through the payment point. This includes full details of information stored on the magnetic strip on the back of cards (why, oh why, arenât smartcards as common here as they are in Europe), as well as anything entered via the keypad, such as a PIN number or a zip code. The device included a wireless transmitter that broadcast 300-400 feet, allowing someone seated in a car located nearby to capture all the information generated at the pump. At the end of a hard dayâs work, the thief would use this information to print the data onto card âblanks.â Given that my information was for an ATM card, they used it to visit bank machines far from my area of town." A link that might be useful: blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/?p=1887