Debt Consolidation Blog

You can’t borrow against your IRA, but you can take out a certain amount to pay for your first home. The government lets you take out up to $10,000 to buy your first home. This money is taxed when you take it out (just like it would be when you retire), but there is no 10% penalty.

Combining this with the $8,000 stimulus credit that runs through November 2009, this can give you $18,000 to work with. The downside is that your IRA is probably worth less now than it was when you put the money in, so you may have to take a loss to take the money out.

Still if you find the right house, it could be a useful means of getting some extra cash together.

The government doesn’t offer a debt consolidation program where you can take all of your credit card and home equity debt and roll it all into a big low interest loan to the government. While the government is supporting banks in some situations to help them rewrite the terms of mortgages for home owners, this isn’t something you can use for consumer debt.

However the US government does offer a program to consolidate student loans. Student loans are generally considered safe because an educated person has more earning power than an uneducated person. At least that is the theory and that is why the government will offer you very good rates to consolidate your student debt into a single loan. It doesn’t hurt that many of the student loans are made by or backed by the government anyway so they don’t really have anything to lose.

If you want to find out more about consolidating student loans, checkout Direct Consolidation. It is a .gov site designed to give you the information you need to make a decision. Many of the forms and publications you can request from the government regarding this topic are available from their site as PDFs and web pages so it can save you a lot of time in doing research.