Hey Dimitri,

I would not say that Personal Loans and Credit Cards are bad debts, they are just unsecured debts. Bad Debt means you have had collectors after you or a bad payment history.

There is a couple of options for you, of course there is the above suggestions which are possibly best, especially if you are on a lower income. The other suggestions would be find a low rate personal loan and consolidate individual debts from yourself and your brother, this will seem less daunting to yourself and would also give you the opportunity to pay down your portion of the debt quicker. The only issue that you may have is consolidating an unsecured debt. If you have a personal loan for a vehicle and you still have value in the vehicle maybe look at down grading to something cheaper and use the funds to pay down your personal debt quicker.

Also, when applying for finance on a home, they will work off your actual repayments to the personal loan debt, whereas credit cards most instituions will use 3% to work out an average of your credit card repayments.

I hope that this helps

Cheers.