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Insights on money, career and trading

3 Tips To Help You Pay Off Your Credit Card Debt

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Daniel at 2:49 pm

There is a huge number of people all throughout the world who are trying to deal with crippling credit card debt. While it’s nice to be able to use a credit card when you have a financial emergency, using a credit card too often when it’s not necessary can quickly put you in the same financial hot water as all the other people trying to handle their credit card debt. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to help you buckle down and pay off your debt sooner rather than later. To show you how, here are three tips for helping you pay off your credit card debt.

Stop Using Your Credit Cards

The first step toward reducing the amount of credit card debt that you have is to stop getting yourself into any further debt on your credit cards. To do this, you need to commit to stop using your credit card to make any of your purchases. According to Erin Peterson, a contributor to CreditCards.com, it’s best if you can find somewhere to stash your cards so that you can’t easily get to them. From now on, make all your purchases using cash so that it’s impossible for you to spend beyond what you’ve budgeted for certain purchases.

Get Rid Of The Highest APR First

When it comes to the strategy for paying off your debt, Brooke Niemeyer, a contributor to Credit.com, recommends that you start paying off the card that has the highest interest rate first. By doing this, you’ll be able to save more money in the long run by not having to pay so much in added interest. Even if the balance on this card is very small or very large, work on paying this one off first so that you can get rid of the debt that could potentially be the biggest for you if you were to let the interest accrued get out of control.

Pay More Than The Minimum Payment

To help you pay down the balances on your cards as quickly as you can, you should do everything in your power to pay more than the minimum payment, at least on the balance that has the highest APR. According to Paul Ritz, a contributor to National Debt Relief, paying just the minimum payment each month won’t actually help you get any closer to paying off the full amount of the debt you have. It will just ensure that you pay more and more interest to the credit card company as times goes on. So to break this cycle and start getting ahead of the interest rate, you have to pay more than what the minimum required payment is. While this might make you stretch a bit, it will be much better than having to continue to make payments on your credit card for decades to come.

If you’re ready to start taking control over your credit card debt, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you do just that.

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