Hi,

I am a new Fool this year, so your advice would be welcome. Our situation is this, we have about $36K in CC debt. Half was achieved by transferring a high interest loan (14%) secured by the house onto a lower (8.9%)fixed rate CC. The rest is on two fixed rate CC at (9.9%). We are paying down the debt, currently total balance goes down about $500 per month.

My wife is putting money into US savings bonds as an emergency fund. She currently has $12K face value in bonds. She is kind of paranoid about having emergency money available. Her father once had an extremely serious problem because he did not have an emergency supply of money. We have excellent credit and could get money from personal lines of credit at the credit unions we belong to.

So two questions.
1) Should we cash in the savings bonds to pay off debt?

2) If so, how do I convince her this is the smart thing to do, given her family history about emergency money?

Sorry for rambling on. Thanks in advance for all your replies.

JimPFool