Lower your Credit Card Debt: Systematically making payments

Posted by Kira Bishop

Thank you to all of you who have made comments on the usefulness of my postings.  I love to hear feedback.  Today, I am continuing on with the Budget topic.  I am going to label this #3, for those of you that want to start at the beginning and go at this systematically, Here are the steps that I have written already.

#1: Set up a working Filing System to deal with all the paperwork.

#2: Set up a working budget and follow it.

#3: Get out of debt systematically(today post) & Lowering your Credit Card Payments.

It is important to know and have organized all the information on your debt.  Hundreds of dollars are spent every year on late fee’s because of the lack of organization.  I have put together a worksheet that will help you track and eliminate your debt.

DebtEliminationCalendar

DebtEliminatorCalendar

The first thing you want to do is gather all of the information on your debt.

1) What debt

2) Balance

3) Minimum Payment

4) Interest Rate

5) Due Date (usually around the same day of the month)

With this information, you take your balance and divide it by your monthly payment, and it will give you the number for how many months until payoff.  After you do this for all of your cards/debt, you will then rank them, so that you can put that information into your monthly payoff calendar.

Here is an example of a Debt-Elimination Calendar from LDS.org.

ldsDebtEl

A Debt-elimination calendar can help you reduce or eliminate  debt.  Insert your creditors into the Calendar.  You can do this based on the Payoff Ranking or by the interest rates.  Once you have repaid the first creditor, add the amount of that monthly payment to your next payment to the second creditor. In the example above, notice that the family finished making monthly payments on their credit card. They then added $110 to the department store’s $70 payment, creating a new monthly payment of $180. Continue the process until all loans are repaid.  This is one of the fastest and efficient ways to repay and eliminate debt.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:46 pm and is filed under -Credit Cards/ Debt, A working Budget, The Budget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Lower your Credit Card Debt: Systematically making payments”

  1. Sensible Savings » Blog Archive » Lower your Internet Bill: Comcast High Speed Internet Secret says:
    March 2nd, 2010 at 4:57 pm

    [...] Lower your Credit Card Bill Payments [...]

  2. Sensible Savings » Blog Archive says:
    March 8th, 2010 at 11:38 pm

    [...] help you Get Out of Debt.  Other Posts regarding “getting out of Debt”  can be found HERE, Lower Credit Card Debt: Systematically Making Payment , and HERE, How to Lower your Credit Card [...]

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