The Internet in particular is awash these days with ads for grand schemes telling you how to pay off your credit card debt. The economic hardships of late have of course left a great many people with credit card bills which are far greater than they could ever have conceived of themselves having and these ads are targeted at those who may be struggling to make the repayments and are willing to clutch at any and every straw offered to them.
When considering how to pay off your credit card debt, however, the first step is to put panic and emotion to one side. Yes, you may be in financial difficulty – perhaps even facing financial ruin if you do not act quickly – but if you are to get out of the mess in which you find yourself you must approach the task in a logical and precise fashion.
Sit down in a quiet area where you are least likely to be disturbed and do some very precise calculations. Determine the exact extent of your debt, the exact amount you are required to pay to service it each month and the exact amount of income and other absolutely essential expenses which you have each month. This will provide you with a precise and accurate picture upon which to base your subsequent calculations.
The next step is to look at non-essential outgoings and not how they can be trimmed but how they can be slashed. The reality is that your credit card debt may have you in serious trouble and all luxuries and unnecessary expenses have to be foregone for a time in order to get your personal finances back to a manageable level. It is essential that you are absolutely ruthless in the performing of this exercise and know that this is precisely what is required.
When you have completed the above task, you may move on to looking at how to reduce essential expenses such as grocery shopping, fuel bills and other household bills. Again, be ruthless and harsh upon yourself. Determine what is necessary and what merely appears to be so. Every saving you can make in this respect will count for something, however small.
At the end of the process, we will have reduced our outgoings to one extent or another. We then have to look at precisely how much we have saved and ensure that we pay at least the biggest part of these savings to our credit card. Only in this respect are we going to be able to pay more than the interest to what may be our extensive credit card debt and start reducing the core debt we have accumulated.