Ladies and Gentleman, I have a question regarding consolidation loans. I read all the posts on this site regarding loans. I thought about posting this in the loans section, but I think it's more appropriate to post it here since what I'm trying to do is settle my debt.

My situation: I'm 26, have a bachelors and work for $70k/year. Not too shabby. I live a pretty active lifestyle but am not a big spender at all. I don't have a car loan, no big screen TV or any other "bad debt" - useless physical possessions that decrease in value. Instead of paying down my debt two years ago I put 15% down and bought a house. I have been renting to students to cover most of the expenses.

The single biggest contributor to my debt situation was school - I don't have parents and I paid for all of my schooling, effectively accumulating 70k of debt. I?ve been carrying that for some two years now, not being able to put a big dent in it. Some 20k of that is OSAP that I don't want to consolidate. The other 50k is spread out over LOC @ 8%, Visa @ 11% and another 3k on my backup VISA @ 19%. I track all of my finances in Quicken and I'm noticing an alarming trend of my interest payments increasing ever so slowly every month. What I think I need to do, and what I think will help, is to 1) consolidate everything into a long term loan 2) reduce my monthly payments and 3) put the difference onto the principal so I actually see this debt go down.

Is this a good plan?

Now regarding my credit: It was R1 a year ago when I got my last report, since then I have two missed payments on one of my visas (the one that I never use and I forgot I used it, stupid of me) So I assume I?m around R2 now.

What I tried doing: I went to my bank, CIBC, and asked for the home line of credit, basically secured line of credit from what I understand, against my house. They came and evaluated my house rather nicely ($50k up from where I bought two years ago) but took 75% of the house value into consideration for the loan and could not offer me enough consolidate all debt, so I didn?t take it.

I also tried going over to the credit counselling agency but they advised me to get a consolidation loan since they would destroy my credit rating if I went through them.

So, in summary, my credit is OK, I got a ton of debt and I want to move to aggressively pay all of this off. I?m sick of looking at the interest lines on my Quicken reports, I feel like I?m working for the bank.

So, who can I talk to or where can I get a good consolidation loan?