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.

Getting out of debt

My wife and I currently have around $1800 of credit card debt. Doesn't sound like much, except that we only make around $1200 a month, and nearly all of this goes to monthly expenses.

So how are we going to get out of debt. We're trying what is called the debt snowball. If you've never heard of this, trust me, it's awesome; if you have heard of this, I highly encourage you to use this system.

Basically it works like this. You write down all of your debts, from the smallest amount owed to the largest amount. You pay the minimum amount on everything but the smallest bill you have, while putting a good amount a month towards that bill. Once that one is paid off, you take what you were paying on that small bill and combine it with the minimum payment on the next to smallest bill. This is what you will now pay monthly towards that bill. This process continues until you have worked your way up to the bill with the highest amount, and by then you are putting a good chunk of change towards paying that one off, and it should go rather quickly.

By seeing the bills actually being paid off, you feel like you're actually making progress with paying your bills, instead of feeling overwhelmed each month when those bills come calling.

My wife and I are currently doing this on our credit card bills, but a recent bonus at my job may allow us to pay off one and completely focus on just the one credit card bill. We will get a chance to use the snowball method when we have to start paying our student loans back, though.