Tackling our debt (#12)

Time to confess the extent of our personal debt:
Personal loan - $38,800
Credit cards - $8,500 across 3 cards

I'm also going to cheat a little here, as I'm ignoring interest that will be charged on my loan over the next 12 months, and I'm hoping to tackle some of the credit card by rolling it into our home loan before the end of next year.  At least with the credit cards eliminated, we can't keep adding to the debt as we pay it off and end up getting no where.

So, in order to achieve #12 on The List (Get rid of our credit cards and halve our personal debt), I'll have to pay $19,400 towards the personal loan and $8,500 on the credit cards, totalling a whopping $27,900!  At first glance, that's kind of overwhelming.

How on earth will we tackle this?  To start with, I'll break it down into what of these amounts is regular payments we're already making, and what is extra that we need to try to find.

I currently pay $650 a month onto the personal loan.  Over the 18 months of the challenge, I will have paid $11,700 off our personal loan in regular payments alone.  Leaving a deficit of $7,700.  That looks much more manageable!

I am currently paying $160 a month onto a credit card (that was chopped up and thrown away when it arrived) used to purchase an appliance on interest free terms.  The interest free is for only 12 months so I have to ensure I would pay it off in that time, which finishes at the end of this year.  From then on, I will use that $160 a month to add to our personal loan payments, which over 12 months will pay an extra $1920, leaving only $5,780 to pull out of thin air.

I'm still not sure exactly how we're going to come up with that, especially as so many other items on my List will involve spending money rather than saving or making money.  I've heard that the average Australian has between $5000 and $7000 of clutter in their home that can be sold on ebay, the markets or such.  I might look for extra work outside hours.  We might try a savings plan, and put all the money we saved on that loan.  Watch out debt, here I come!