Sometimes, if your income has dropped or you are in a situation where you have gotten yourself into too much debt. It is best to seek help managing your debt, or applying for a debt consolidation loan, which can lower your monthly payments and leave you extra money every month to start paying down your principal balance.

You can have financial breathing room if you can consolidate your bills into lower monthly payments. It is a smart thing to do if you are struggling to make your minimum payments.

There are many ways that debt can be consolidated. If you have a home with some equity, you can apply for an equity line of credit which can be used to consolidate your debt. Even if you have no equity in your home, you may be able to qualify for a home loan which will go over amount of equity you have in your home, sometimes up to 125% of your homes value.

We must note that investing into indexes isn't risk-free investment. There are results with loosing in our testing. The poorest result is loosing about 33% of initial investment into S&P 500.

Diversification is best way to reduce risk. Investing into 2-3 different indexes can reduce risk significantly. Best results are given by investing into indexes with different types of assets (bond index and share index) or different classes of assets (small caps, mid caps, big caps).

You can find full version of this article with full results of our tests here: http://fplab.com/node/116

Alexander Korablev is head of FPLab Team.