How best to use unexpected tax rebate ?

[OhdearNigel]

I got a rebate of £820 completely out of the blue yesterday. Once I have paid off a couple of my own small debts (a wine bill from a friend who owns a wine merchant and some money I borrowed from a friend) I will be left with about £700. We have a lot of debt and I want some advice on where would be most prudent to use the money.

We have a waitrose card with about £2500 on it, an MBNA card with about £5k and personal loans - about £20k in total. We are paying off the loan with a projected end date of early 2013 so I am not worried about that. We also have a Debenhams account fo about £360 which was DH buying some clothes for himself. We also use most of our overdraft of £3k every month

We have a decent income and are managing our debts and our projections are that we will be in the black by 2015.

Where would you advise that I put the money ? I don't want to pay it off hte waitrose card as that is the one we regularly use so it will just be used again. I'm inclined to get rid of the storecard as then it's paid and I can cancel it and also it's the highest APR

NB: DH does not know about this money - he would fritter it if he knew so I will not be telling him until I declare "I have paid £700 off the MBNA card with my tax rebate"

And tax rebate is from the year before I even met DH so don't feel obliged to tell him

i would pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first. suspect this might be the store card.
you are right to use it to pay off debts in your situation imvho, don't be tempted to spend it or let dh do so...

Agree with paying something off the one that costs the highest % rate in interest. Could be the overdraft or one of the credit cards.

I agree that you should pay what has the highest % interest. Although one of my old habits was to pay something off and use it up again. So on that basis perhaps pay off the Debenhams card (and then get rid of it) or some of your overdraft and then reduce it. If you paid it off the MBNA card would you be able to move the waitrose debt there so that you only have one amount to pay (if of course it's 0% or low%). Have you thought of doing a 0% balance transfer? We did this recently and it really helped.