Few individuals would deny that using credit cards may make usual life more simple, lowering the need to have cash and making it easy to shop online and by cellphone.

But, expending with plastic can be a tad too easy, because it doesn’t always feel as if you’re actually parting with any cash. This suggests the lure is always spend without taking into consideration the consequences too mindfully, until you hear the ominous thud of a tremendous credit card bill hitting the doormat.

If you were trapped in this way, the dimensions of your credit card debt may look overpowering, but don’t panic - here are a few simple steps it’s possible to decide to try to start getting what you owe back at bay.

Attempt to make a little more than the lowest monthly payments:

The lowest payments required by credit card companies have progressively decreased in the past. 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 monthly payments this small compared to your debt, a significant bite of each 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 working 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.

Put in priority your card debts:

For people with more than one card with different rates of interest, it seems 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 might have a lower rate but a higher balance.

Look at statements to see which card is charging you most in interest month after month, and try to center on paying back this card first by putting any spare cash you have into extra payments while keeping to the minimum requirements on your other cards.

Change your card:

The credit card marketplace is very competitive, and rates have fallen over the last several years. You may well be stuck with an old card charging an old rate that is much higher than newer cards. If you can get a new card with a lower rate and transfer your account balance on to it, you could save a lot in interest charges, assisting you to bring down your debt. If you can get a card with an introductory rate on balance transfers then all the better - you’ll get a few months of interest free credit which you can use to really decrease your balance as 100% of every repayment will be helping to clear the debt.

Debt consolidation:

If having a cheaper card isn’t an option or isn’t something you feel happy about, then maybe a loan consolidation 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 down-side to these loans is that the repayment period might be quite long, and so even though your repayments will with some luck 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.

Watch your spending!

All the above recommendations for getting your debt managed 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, cutting 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.

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