[berettafan]

your moms attitudes have some reasonable basis. cash is king right now and new credit is tough to get. people that lived through the depression are very familiar with this thought process.

i would suggest the following as an aggressive course of action (if possible):
-Get her switched to a -0- interest cc and set up automatic pmts such that her cc is paid off in a few years
-if the car note is a relatively low interest rate, say 5% or less, i'd let it ride. a large part of her pmts now are principle anyways so she's really paid most of the interest already. iow you aren't necessarily saving that much by paying it off early.

sometimes financial decisions aren't black and white. sometimes we fail to assign the appropriate value to the risk of letting our cash go.

of course as long as we have debt we are all working for 'the man'