If you have consumer debt, you're probably looking for a strategy to pay it off. Some people use a home equity loan as a way to get a lower rate, others use 0% balance transfers, still others just call their credit card company and ask them to lower their rates.

What should you do? Here are few differing view points and strategies from personal finance bloggers who've been there.

Reuters is reporting that government-backed mortgage lender Freddie Mac expects to lose $10-12 billion before the subprime meltdown is over. Previously, everyone was freaking out about theirThe Washington Post has a really interesting article about a housing counselor in the D.C. area who saw the subprime meltdown first hand.
Coppedge saw it coming in slow motion. Around this time last year, she was mostly dealing with renters who were behind on payments. Rarely did she counsel at-risk homeowners. When she did, they were usually suffering a one-time setback such as job loss.

"Then in midsummer, we felt the tide turning," Coppedge said. "People started trickling in. First they came in to express concern about their loans and gathered information. Then by September, everything picked up speed and suddenly people were telling us they were behind on their mortgages."

Many of those people had taken out adjustable-rate loans. Some used them to buy homes they otherwise could not afford when prices soared in 2005 and 2006. Others were constantly refinancing to pull cash out of their homes.

These loans were usually subprime mortgages, typically made to people with blemished credit. But they were in no way limited to low-income borrowers, said Coppedge, whose recent clients typically earn $60,000 to $110,000 a year.

"People from all walks are getting hit by this," Coppedge said. Meanwhile, the word over at the Credit Slips blog is that the Bush mortgage rate freeze will Frances Joy Taylor had had about $2 million in assets, which she intended to leave to her church, before she met a businessman named Tyrone Dash. Dash took over her affairs and "methodically liquidated or leveraged almost everything she owned: her bank accounts and securities, her insurance policies, her credit cards, her two apartment buildings and, ultimately, her home," says the Seattle Times. Frances suffers from Alzheimer's.

The entire story is horrific, but the most relevant part for our purposes comes at the end, when Frances' finances have been so wrecked that Dash can only borrow from now-defunct subprime lender Ameriquest:
A year later, Frances paid the prepayment penalty of $4,350 to refinance her home again, this time with Ameriquest Mortgage, then the nation's largest private subprime lender. A 26-year-old salesman in Tukwila collected Frances' information and set up the loan. He then sent it to the company's underwriting department for approval.

The salesman, Laughton Dean Fisher, had a technical-school degree in electronics. He earned a monthly salary of $2,000 but made most of his income in commissions.

In a handwritten application, Frances' age is listed correctly, but the Ameriquest records repeatedly showed her as 30 years younger -- at 62 years old. Fisher, who no longer works for Ameriquest, couldn't explain the error. He said, however, that the company forbade selling adjustable loans to anyone older than 65.

The company listed Frances' income for the previous year at $32,000 a month -- treating transfers between her accounts as income.

Frances paid Ameriquest $18,000 in fees for the loan, a $297,500 adjustable-rate mortgage, in July 2003.

Nine months later, Frances applied for another refinance from Ameriquest. The timing violated a rule Ameriquest had adopted in 2000 to stop a Federal Trade Commission investigation into allegations of predatory lending. That rule required Ameriquest to wait at least two years before refinancing one of its customers' loans.

By then, Frances no longer owned any rental property, was behind on eight credit-card bills, had been late on several mortgage payments and had monthly income from Social Security of $761.

But in its paperwork, Ameriquest listed her occupation as landlord. It also used altered tax returns that whited out her business losses. Ameriquest lent her $324,000. It charged her more than $19,000 in fees and added an $8,424 penalty if she paid off the adjustable note within three years.

Diane Haugsvar of Seattle notarized the loan papers. She said she still can see Frances sitting at her dining-room table, nodding and saying "OK, OK," in a singsong voice as she signed the documents. She remembered Frances, and her house, because the situation seemed chaotic.

Haugsvar noticed clutter everywhere, and much of it seemed to belong to Dash. She remembers thinking: He's supposed to be taking care of her, yet he's making it worse.

She didn't think the situation rose to the level of a 911 call, but she now w