Rich Snail

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While setting up your budget you listed down all your debts and minimum repayment. You now have to get back to this list, review it, and think over your strategy to get rid of most of them. Why not all of them? Not all debts are bad. Some are an inescapable part of life; mortgages as an example. Your goal should be to eliminate the bad ones.

Stop the bleeding

The first thing you need to address is stopping your debts from growing. Use your budget, track your progresses, and make sure that your expenses match your income. If it does not already, you are creating debts; so review your figures, and do your best to make it work; earn more / spend less… whatever you prefer as long as it gets back to sustaining your lifestyle.
One of your budget line is allocated to your debt-repayment; it should covers your minimum repayments, plus, ideally, some extra reimbursement. That extra can be used in two very different ways to get rid of debts.

The financial way

If you are a very logical and methodical person, you should pay off your highest interest debts first. In the long run you will pay lesser interest rate than if you do the contrary.

• Order your debts by interest rate
• Pay all your minimums payments
• All of the remaining money should go to your highest-interest rate one
• Once you cleared the highest-interest rate debt, your money goes to the next-highest-rate one.

The psychological way

If you need to see results quickly, you shoud attack your debts by reverse balance order. This is what Dave Ramsey called “the Debt Snowball method” in his book The Total Money Makeover. His concept is simple; you should attack your debts from the smaller-balanced one to the higher-balanced one. This will help you achieve quick-results, and help you stay on track.

• Order your debts by balance
• Pay all your minimums payments
• All of the remaining money should go to your smaller debt
• Once you cleared the smaller debt, your money goes to the next-lowest-balanced one.

To each his own. What is important is that you stop creating debts, start reimbursing more than the minimum, and stay on track. It is not an easy process and it is a lengthy one. So good luck and keep track of your progresses.