Through a couple hardships over the past decade, I managed to build up a debt of around 5m JPY over various credit cards (16% APR..) and other shopping loans 8-10%. I managed to transfer this all to an SMBC card loan at 7% which has greatly reduced my debt burden, but this still seems really high given the current central bank interest rates?
In the UK we are pretty much constantly bombarded by ads for debt transfer and loan consolidation services, with deals like no interest periods on balance transfers and low rates in general, but I haven’t seen any of the like in Japan. I understand the market for credit here in general is much smaller than western countries and that is likely the reason, but is there really nothing like that out there and are card loans at 6-8% the lowest possible options despite near zero interest rates..? Is there no at least slightly lower rate loan I can take out from somewhere for this purpose?
by CommerceOnMars69