Pay off your credit cards

Even though it's convenient, you should never, ever only pay the minimum payment on all of your credit cards. I did a little work with a calculator today, and if we payed just the minimum payment for one of our credit cards, it would take us 48 months (4 years!) to pay it off. By just paying ten dollars more a month, we can knock that one out in only 30 months, which would save us $324 dollars in a year! By paying twenty dollars more a month, we could pay it off in 22 months, saving us $444 dollars in a year.

This might be a little confusing to people who use the "debt snowball" method to get out of debt, because you pay the minimum payment on all your debts except the smallest one. The reason this is different is because you are paying more than the minimum payment (hopefully as much as you can) on one bill, which will accelerate the pace you pay off that bill, and then you will move on to the next one. The point is not to pay the minimum payment on ALL of your bills, otherwise you won't have them paid off until your great grandchildren do it for you.