This is my opinion, and my opinion only. I'm not saying it's best for you. I'm saying it's what I would do were I in your situation and decided at that point I wanted to get out of debt. (I've been debt free for about 10 years now.)
Lets say your CU loans and medical bills are $25K just for the purposes of "my opinion". 🙂
With $73K owed on the house, $40K in CC debt and $25K for the other stuff, that comes to $138K. I'd look at a few numbers first.
Whats the total of all my payments each month, including the house? Y0u need that "magic number" which you can get quite easily.
Once I've got that number then I'd want to look at doing a refi on the house for "no more" than $140K and I would require of myself that it be a 15 year mortgage at the absolute longest. The shorter period on the mortgage will get me a lower rate than a 30 year mortgage will. Additionally, payments on a $140K mortgage at 15 years will be damn close to (maybe less? maybe a bit more?) than my current payments on the 30 year mortgage I now how. But I'm not looking at "just" the mortgage payment I'm making now. I'm looking at the total of all payments I make each month; mortgage, CC payments, CU loan payments, medical bill payments; the whole nine yards.
Now I did a bit of work with the intrate excel program.
If I refi the house for $140K for 15 years with a 4.5% fixed interest rate, my payments (not including escrow) will be $1,070.99 a month. When you figure in escrow for the property taxes and insurance, where I live that would be about another $200 a month, absolute tops. My last property tax bill was $1,100 and my last insurance bill for the year was $857. So that's roughly $2K for the year. Figure that into escrow for 12 equal payments a month and that comes to an additional $163.10 a month added to the payment for escrow. So I'd be looking at monthly mortgage payments of $1234.09 per month. I'll play it safe and round it up to $1300 a month, since my intrate excel spreadsheet isn't perfect with a margin of error of less than 1% (which adds up fast on longer loan terms). Then knowing that property taxes do get adjusted every year, I can pretty much figure I'll have the house paid off (or close to it) before the taxes and insurance would cause my escrow payments to rise above $200 a month.
So I've got my figure of $1300 a month which is the "highest" I would expect to pay over the 15 year loan term. Now lets look at the total of all the payments I'm making now. If it's more than $1300 a month, I'm gonna do the refi with the intention of "never" getting myself into this kind of crap again. Not. Ever.
Once the re-fi is done and all the debts are paid, I'm going to spend however long it takes to use my "savings" realized from lower payments on all that debt I paid off, to build myself an emergency fund of no less than three months of living expenses. Generally though, I recommend anywhere between 3 and 6 months of living expenses. That way, if you lose your job or end up unable to work for "any" reason, you've got a bit of breathing room while you seek other sources of income.
