Individual customers struggling to pay of high credit card, personal overdrafts and store cards choose to consolidate debt. Debt consolidation is nothing but the effort to pay off these numerous loans by availing of one single loan. Of course, it only works if one is able to take the loan at a considerable lower interest rate or a fix rate. It is obviously more advantageous if one has to service one loan instead of two or three loans.

Often, debt consolidation involves moving to a secured loan from several unsecured loans and keeping an asset, may be a house, as collateral. Against this house, serving as collateral, a mortgage is secured. One benefit of this kind of collateralization process is that it helps you to get a loan with a lower interest rate. This process, allows the owner, to force sale the asset, so as to pay back the loan. Since the risk here is reduced, so in the process, the rate of interest is also reduced.

If one misses a credit payment, or makes a late payment, then one gets an awful credit rating against the credit agreement. In such situations, credit reference agencies identify this as an adverse credit and this makes making new borrowings troublesome, and leads to higher payments monthly. Very few banks or financial agencies will be willing to help in this situation. This is exactly the reason, why most consumers, therefore tries debt consolidation by the process of mortgaging the house.

At times the debt consolidation companies tend to discount the loan amount, especially when they see that the consumer is at the verge of bankruptcy. In this situation, the debt consolidator tries to buy the loan off at a discounted rate. A shrewd consumer can actually shop around to see who will pass on the maximum saving. Before the decision is taken to consolidate the loan, it needs to be weighed prudently as bankruptcy could seriously impact the debtor’s ability to pay his debts.

Consolidation of debt works best when one is struggling with credit card loans. Credit cards generally carry much higher interest rate. Even a bank gives unsecured loans at a lower rate than a credit card. An asset like a property or a car could secure a loan with much lower rate, allowing the consumer to pay of the debt much sooner at a much lower interest rate.

However, the loans taken against house can worsen if the personal circumstances change. One may choose Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) to buy peace of mind, but then it increases the monthly repayments.

Those consumers who do not take PPI should know that they run the risk of getting their property repossessed in an event when personal circumstances alter. In that case a consumer is better off looking for a debt solution other than mortgaging his house, especially if the particular person has a bad credit rating. One clearly needs to know that if someone has gone in for a loan by mortgaging the property, other debt solutions are no longer possible.

In theory the advantage that the debt consolidation gives to a consumer with high interest rates, gets largely minimized as companies generally see this as an opportunity to refinance at a much higher fee. These fees are almost close to the mortgage fees. Some of the corrupt companies would go to the extent of waiting for the client to get cornered before charging the maximum fees. The client realizing the threat of loosing the property if they do not agree to the refinance, they generally agree to pay such high fees to finalize the debt consolidation process. This is known as predator lending. However, in most cases debt consolidation does not entail predatory lending.