There’s no getting away from it: January can be a brutal month for many people. The festivities of the holiday season have ended, you have to switch from relaxation-and-gorging mode to work-and-thrift mode and the impending months of cold weather are enough to make brass monkeys distinctly nervous. As the gift wrapping heads for the local dump, you also have to take a long, hard look at just how you’re going to tackle those post-Christmas credit card totals.

Credit cards really aren’t a good way of borrowing, especially for those who are making minimum payments. If it’s within your reach financially, the wisest policy is to zap your credit card spending as completely as you possibly can, as quickly as you possibly can. But how?

As we’ve frequently illustrated here, many people actually have the means to tackle those bills without realising it. Money isn’t just what you’ve got in the bank or a savings account; it’s often locked up in the form of a valuable possession. You can “unbolt” this asset, convert it into cash, and use it to settle credit debts.

Most people immediately think of pawnbrokers at this point. However, thanks to the UK’s unique new peer-to-peer lender platform, Unbolted, that’s no longer the most lucrative choice. Just check the representative APRs of typical pawnbrokers on their websites. Here’s a few of them:

If that just caused a sharp intake of breath, relax. There’s a better, faster way of temporarily turning your valuable possession into cash: the unbeatable Unbolted secured asset loan. Whereas the pawnbrokers above have representative APRs ranging from 69% to a staggering 163% and payday lenders in the stratosphere, Unbolted’s representative APR is just 40.3%. Unbolted can keep the cost of borrowing so low because, unlike bricks-and-mortar lenders, it’s a digital, online p2p platform, which means that overheads are minimised.

Unbolted has hundreds of lenders who prefer to lend their money rather than get feeble returns in a savings account. You need not worry about your credit rating - unlike most other peer-to-peer platforms, prospective borrowers are never subjected to an intrusive and potentially damaging credit search at Unbolted. That’s because your creditworthiness is irrelevant to Unbolted’s lenders; instead, we collateralise the asset you place in our safekeeping for the duration for the loan as security for the borrowing. If the worst comes to the worst and you’re unable to settle, we’ll sell the asset at auction to recover the outstanding sum, returning any excess over the agreed sum to you.

The list of possessions that we consider collateralisable assets may surprise you. It includes luxury handbags, jewellery, gold and silver (bullion or coins), luxury watches, classic cars, fine art, fine wines, diamonds, rare books and manuscripts and musical instruments. We don’t use property, however.

If the money you need is locked up in a valuable possession, don’t hock it. Unbolt it.