Few people would deny that using credit cards helps make every day life more simple, lowering the need to hold funds and making it effortless to buy online and by phone.
But, expending with plastic can be a little too easy, since it doesn’t always look like you’re in reality parting with any money. This means the temptation is almost always to spend without taking into consideration the repercussions too carefully, until you hear the threatening thud of a whopping credit card bill hitting the doormat.
If you have been caught out like this, the size of your credit card debt may seem overpowering, but don’t panic – there are some basic steps you possibly can go onto begin getting your debt back in check.
Seek to make a bit more than the bare minimum monthly payments:
The lowest payments required by credit card companies have slowly dropped over the years. Where once it was typical to have to repay a minimum of 5% of your balance every month, it’s now common to only have to pay 2.5% or 3%. With repayments this small compared to your debt, a sizable piece of each monthly payment gets swallowed up in interest charges. Depending on the APR rate of your card, up to 75% of each payment could be ‘lost’ in this way, meaning that it takes a very long time for your balance to reduce to any great extent.
By aiming to repay more than the minimum, even if only by a little, you can speed this process up, and in the long term you’ll end up paying much less in interest charges.
Focus on your card debts:
When you’ve got more than one card account with different rates of interest, it is sensible to concentrate on the one with the highest interest charges. This means not just the one with the highest interest rate, but the one which actually charges you most each month, which could have a lower rate but a higher balance.
Look at your statements to see which card is charging you most in interest month to month, and try to target repaying this card first by putting any spare cash you have into extra payments while keeping to the minimums on your other cards.
Change your card:
The credit card marketplace is very competitive, and rates have fallen over the last year or two. You may well be bound to an old card charging an old rate that is much higher than newer cards. If you’re able to get a new card with a lower rate and transfer your account balance on to it, you could save a lot in interest charges, letting you lower your debt. If you can get a card with an introductory rate on balance transfers then all the better – you will get a few months of interest free credit which you can use to really drive down your balance as 100% of each repayment will be helping to clear your debt.
Debt consolidation:
If finding a less costly card isn’t an option or isn’t something you feel happy about, then maybe a debt consolidation loan would be worth looking at. If you take out a loan and use this money to pay off all your card debts, you could benefit from a lower rate as loans are normally quite a bit cheaper than credit cards.
The side effects to these loans is that the repayment period might be quite long, and so even though your repayments will maybe be lower, you’ll stay in debt for longer and so end up paying more in interest. Done carefully, however, consolidation can be a sound move if there’s little chance of clearing your debt in any other way.
Be careful about your spending!
All the above methods for getting your debt under control will only work if you stop getting deeper into debt – and this means stopping spending on your cards. Ideally, you’d cut them up so that you can’t use them again, but this might not be realistic as you may need to keep them as a credit option for unexpected expenses. Nonetheless, decreasing your spending to an absolute minimum will keeping your repayments as high as possible is the only sure strategy to clearing your debt in the long term.
Tags: credit card debt, credit cards
