Frequently asked questions
Questions people actually ask before deciding whether to consolidate, answered without sales language.
Debt consolidation means taking out one new loan or credit line and using it to pay off several existing debts, so you are left with a single payment to a single lender. Common forms include an unsecured personal loan, a balance-transfer credit card, and a home-equity loan. Consolidation restructures debt; it does not remove it.
No. A consolidation loan pays off the old balances and replaces them with a new balance of roughly the same size, sometimes larger once an origination fee is added. What can change is the interest rate, the repayment term and the monthly payment. Reducing the principal owed is debt settlement, which is a different product with different consequences.
Yes. If the payment is lower mainly because the repayment term is longer, you make more payments and can pay more interest in total even at a lower rate. Origination fees add to the total as well. Multiply the monthly payment by the number of months on each side and add fees before deciding.
No. The Financial Checkup does not perform a credit check of any kind, soft or hard. It does not contact any credit bureau or lender. It only performs arithmetic on figures you type into your own browser.
No. Financial Checkup entries stay in your browser's session storage for the current tab. They are not transmitted to PDC, are not stored on a server, and are not sent to any lender, broker or third party. Closing the tab or selecting Start Over clears them.
Neither. PDC is an independent financial-education website. It is not a lender, loan broker, credit-repair company, debt-settlement provider or financial adviser, and nothing on the site is financial, legal or tax advice.
Compare seven figures for your current debts and for the proposed loan: the interest rate or weighted-average APR, the total required monthly payment, the repayment term, all origination and other fees, the estimated total repayment, whether the rate is fixed or variable, and the prepayment terms. Also check whether the new loan is secured by any property.
PDC is free to use, charges visitors nothing, sells no financial data and runs no display advertising. PDC is not currently compensated by any provider. In the future PDC may earn a commission when a visitor uses a provider link, and any such relationship will be disclosed beside the link before you click it.
Yes, the dashboard is free and does not require payment. It also does not require you to consent to marketing email: the optional updates checkbox is separate and starts unchecked. The dashboard file is still being finalised, so requests are not being accepted yet.
It is written to your browser's session storage, used to display your results and to build your PDF inside the browser, and then discarded when the tab closes or you select Start Over. It is never written to local storage, never uploaded and never logged. Avoid using the tool on a shared device, since anyone using that browser session could see it.