Debt Management Solutions By Richard Stranberg At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Well, you woke up today and after drinking your coffee you realized you're in a heap of debt. How did you get there you wonder? Millions of Americans are finding themselves more and more in debt. The average balance per family household is now just over $9000. Some are considerably higher. Having a significantly high amount of credit card debt doesn't necessarily result from going on lots of shopping sprees. It usually occurs from a life changing situation such as a medical problem, loss of a spouse, or loss of job. The latter happened to me.

So how do you get out of this?

The first thing to do is to take control of your money. Develop a spending plan. What's a spending plan? It's essentially a budget. I don't like to call it a budget because the term budget seems to be very stringent and doesn't lend itself to flexibility. I heard a pastor once say that him and his wife decided to write down for one month exactly what they were spending their money on. Each one carried a small 59 cent notepad and wrote down every time they spent money on something. Their result? They came to the conclusion asking themselves, "We spent money on what?!"

Make life changes.

This usually results from the first step - developing a spending plan. You begin to see areas that you may have been spending frivolously or areas that you know you can cut back in or just plain eliminate. If you are in a large amount of debt, you may need to consider the eliminate things route. The only thing that I can eliminate is my spending money for lunch at work. I did eliminate this and started to pack my lunch. I heard one debt counselor say, "If people start to tease you about the way you're doing things like, 'packing again?', then you're doing the right thing." It does make a difference. I actually see money in my pocket now. So what's another debt management solution?

Pay more than the minimum on your credit card balances and pay the smallest one first.

This is probably the most important debt management solution next to developing a spending plan. First, people always say pay more than the minimum. This is important. By paying more than the minimum, you can drastically reduce in some cases the amount of interest that you are paying to a credit card and the amount of actual time you'll be paying on it. Also, another significant thing to do and which is probably the most significant is to pay your smallest credit card first and then apply the that payment to your next highest credit card and then so on and so on. This is called the snowball effect. Many people argue that it's better to pay off the highest interest rate card first. While this may make sense when you think about it initially, it actually works out that by paying the smaller one first will give you an extra punch while moving up to the bigger balance credit cards. I'm going to be developing a program on my site here sometime in the future that will let you pick which method you want to take and let it calculate how long it would take to pay off your debt using each method.

There you have it! Three sure-fire ways to get you on your road to financial freedom!

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