Consumer advocate radio show host Clark Howards thinks most people are kidding themselves when they spring for a debt-consolidation loan:

It’s been my experience that when people do a debt-consolidation loan, all they really end up doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. With one transaction, their credit card bills suddenly stop, and those people then say, “Oh, how nice, it’s all so tidy now, I now just have everything on one convenient bill.”

However, human nature being what it is, most of those very same people will then go and again charge their credit cards back up to where they had been. They’ll then have those bills and the bill from their debt-consolidation on top of that, and then what they’ve created is actually much worse than the initial problem they had.

You can push the vegetables around your plate but you still gotta eat them.

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