| One position that many people find themselves in is a growing mountain of credit card debt. This can happen for several reasons. They can ignore the bills when they come in the mail, hurting their credit score and making interest payments shoot up. They can also continue to make purchases, however small, that all add to the problem. The following suggestions will help you reduce credit card debt. Start Paying - Stop Charging First and foremost, do not ignore bills from the credit card company that arrive in the mail. Not paying them will only make the problem worse, much worse. Paying them, though, is a delicate process and requires some good planning in order to be executed properly. When it comes to reducing credit card debt, consider cards individually instead of the combined total of everything you owe. In this way you will be able to decide which bills need to paid first and which can wait for later. You can also focus on eliminating debt one card at a time. If you have a wallet full of credit cards, move them onto just one or two that charge a low interest rate. Then, choose the card with that carries the lowest balance and concentrate your efforts on paying that one off. Baby steps are the name of the game when working to lower your credit card debt since taking on everything at once will not turn out well. Paying off that first card will leave you with some extra cash in hand that can be directed to the next card. At this point, some individuals choose to focus payments on the card that charges the highest interest rate so that is stops increasing. Regardless of what you decide to do, splitting your money between two different cards will not be nearly as effective as focusing your entire effort on just one. Most importantly though, you should do all you can to avoid adding to the problem. That means doing what you can to use a debit card or paying in cash, both of which only use what you have as opposed to adding to your debt. Up front, the item costs the same, but over time the purchase can gain up to 200% of its original expense in interest. Reducing charges is another important step to reducing credit card debt, and soon you'll be paying those credit cards off instead of seeing the bills continue to rise. |
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