One of the biggest problems with any scheme to pay off credit cards by using more credit is most people do NOT change their spending habits. The average consumer will take out a home equity loan to pay off outstanding balances and then only 2 or 3 years later find themselves with a home equity loan and credit cards at their max again. That doesn't solve the problem; it makes it worse. Plus there is the potential to lose you home if you fail to make payments on the home equity loan. In my humble opinion, this is not the best solution to your problem unless you and your significant other make some changes in your spending habits. Switching from one low/no interest credit card can be very damaging to your credit score. One of the components of a credit score is how long your current accounts have been open. Longer is better. New credit cards every 6 months will lower your score which means you pay higher rates or cannot qualify for those "teaser" rates. Also, be aware that the teaser rates will escalate very rapidly if you are ever late with a payment. The solution that I suggest to the personal financial management classses I teach is to stop using credit cards for any daily expenses. Save them for emergencies (a death in the family, an earthquake destroys your house, a hurricane is coming and you have to evacuate). Concentrate on paying off one card by paying extra on that card every month but continue to make the minimum payments on every card you have. When that card is paid off, apply that payment to the next card until it is paid off. If you have trouble avoiding temptation with credit cards, put them in a ziplock bag and seal it. Put that bag in another bag and fill it with water. Put both bags in the freezer and leave it there. Anytime you need a card it is available, but you have to wait to thaw it out to use it which means you have time to think about whether or not you really, really NEED what you plan to purchase with credit. While it sounds "dorky" and simplistic, it does work. Good luck

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 actually did this. I had about 6k in credit card debt, store charges with 22.9%+ interest rates. I decided to pay those off with my student loan refunds. I calcuated that I would save more than $1,500 a year in interest, plus I have about an extra $300 a month- which now goes to student loans. However, I have close to 85k in student loan debt. I got my BS- International Affairs and Psychology and MA- Teaching and Technology back to back. So I had no time to pay down my student loans. Here is a simple way to cut cost of internet and cable. Call and cancel your service and cite some other company can give you a better deal if you start up with them. They won't want to lose your business. I was paying 150 a month for basic cable and high speed internet (need that for work), but after I got it down to 50 a month for the next six months. Here is a link that might be useful: Article on How to Save

9 active cards may be a temptation, but the fact is that the credit companies look at how much of your available credit you've used up. So, say you have 10 cards that have a limit of $1000 each--total $10,000. You owe $800/card--total $8000. You pay off one card, so your total owed is now $7200. That's 72% of your credit limit. Now, if you cancel the card you just paid off, your total credit limit is $9000, and the $7200 is 80% of that. The percentage of unused credit has gone down. This makes you look like a worse credit risk than if you had left that card account open--even though you're improving your handling of money by paying off cards. Don't cancel any cards unless you're really a serious shopping addict and will spend the day buying on QVC using account numbers off your old statements out of the file cabinet. Instead, freeze them in a block of ice, put them under the mattress, even cut them up--just keep the accounts open. At least until you've gotten several cards paid off. I actually like Karla's system a lot. As an aside, i'm always surprised at how many cards my credit report shows i have. There are a couple of store cards that I haven't seen in years, but they're still on there. To say nothing of the fact that AMEX for some reason has me down as having had something like 5 cards, when I've only ever had 1 at a time. Go figure. They must have counted each time the acct number changed or something. So 9 cards isn't really too bizarre. To make it even more confusing, I've gotten 'adverse action' notices a couple of times (that's where they send a form letter saying that something in my credit made me get less than the absolute best deal). In the 'reasons' section, it said both that I had too many credit accounts and too few. Huh? WTF? Be sure before you start house-shopping to pull at least one copy of your credit report (DH's too), and pay the extra money for your credit score. Make sure you've gotten any errors handled.