The only way to lower your overall bill is to stop paying the minimums for 6 months or longer, trash your credit, and then have the cash to pay them off in a settlement. If you stop paying your cards and trash your credit but dont have the money to pay the settlement, there is no point. In the settlement, after 180 days of non payment, you can negotiate for 40 to 50 cents on the dollar. The longer you go with non payment, the higher the odds of a company having sold your debt at auction to a second debt collections agency. The more times it is sold, the cheaper your debt will be to settle, but the longer your credit will be trashed. If you can't come up with $15,000 in 6 to 8 months and are set on not paying the debt, you'd be better off to just cut up the credit cards and ignore them for a few years until you can just pay off the debt. Either way, you trash your credit for a long time.
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