Is a balance transfer card better than debt consolidation loan?
I have about $15K in debt on credit cards, plus $20K on a personal loan. The CC debt is at 22% interest while the loan is 10.5%. I have good credit, somewhere around 770. I would like to consolidate everything to one payment as much as possible, and obviously lower the interest on the CCs at the very least.
Worth noting, we've already cut our expenses as much as we realistically can. I make a reasonably decent income but over the past 5 years my expenses have gone up 25-30% while my salary has gone up about 5%. So the goal is to make actual progress without increasing our monthly payment.
It seems like there are two options. One is a debt consolidation loan from a bank. I know these are generally frowned upon but are they all bad? Some seem to be essentially personal loans with banks that have reasonable interests rates in the 7-8% range.
The other is getting another credit card with a low intro rate. But I've always read that credit cards are worse for credit than a personal loan, at least generally speaking.
So which is a better option?
Posted Oct 28, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC