Your Credit Card Debt Is Drowning You - Here’s How To Reduce It
Friday, April 24th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
We are a credit driven society. In fact, we are so credit driven that when we buy something we often instinctively reach to pay for it with our credit card, even if we have the cash. The result, in recent years, has been to slowly push us deeper and deeper in debt to the credit card companies. It happens so slowly that we’re unaware of it until one day we wake up and suddenly realize that we owe $5,000, $15,000, $20,000 or more in credit card bills. If not taken care of, we’ll soon find ourselves working the rest of our lives paying interest on items we bought years ago. If you don’t want to end up in that situation, you’d better come up with a plan to pay off your credit card bills today. Here are a few tips to help you.
There’s one thing that you can do immediately to get out of credit card debt today. Stop adding to it. Will Rogers once said in one of his more popular quotes, “if you find yourself in a hole - the first thing to do is stop digging”. A lot of people, if they were to stop and think before they paid for anything using their credit card would see that it is probably an item that is not necessary for them to have. Especially if you are deep in depth, it’s probably in your best financial interest to work out a better method of paying for it. If you continue to charge non-essential items on your credit cards, you are simply digging yourself deeper into a financial hole.
Secondly, you need an organized method of paying off your debt. One of the best ways is to organize your credit card bills by interest, highest to lowest, and concentrate on first paying off the balance with highest rates. The majority of people in this country lack a basic understanding of interest rates and how important they are. A difference in an annual interest of a mere 1% can make a difference of thousands of dollars over the life span of your loan. But the even worst part is that you are paying off the loan in after tax dollars - money that you’ve already paid taxes on. So, if you pay $150 a month in interest on your credit card, and you are in the 25% income tax bracket, you had to actually earn $200 of income to make that payment. This deadly combination of taxes and high interest rates are perpetually working against anyone trying to pay off a large credit card debt. That’s why it’s urgently important to pay off the highest interest cards first. If you do this faithfully and continuously every month, you’ll slowly begin to see the balance drop down off of that card.
It’s possible that with your current income, you discover that there’s no way that you can begin paying down your credit card debt. In this case, the best thing to do is to try to find a part time job with the intent of using all the money you bring in to pay off your credit card debt. Working a part time job for six months or a year will certainly put a strain on your time but it’s a short term strain. The good thing, however, is that once you’re done with your part time job you’ll suddenly find your financial life becoming less stressful. With each card that you pay off you can breath a little easier because you no longer have to come up with the large sums of money to pay your monthly credit card bills.
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