Here are a few suggestions on ways to get out of general debt:
Review your living expenses,decide where you can cut some spending.
A change in lifestyle can be a simple and effective adjustment. I see friends who MUST have their Starbucks daily,so lets do some math:
I sometimes get a Vanilla Bean Venti size Cappuccino,it comes out to $4.something,so if we round down to $4 even we get $4 x 30 days in a month = $120/mo for something that you can live without. So given the fact I know these friends are spending around $75-$150 a month on Starbucks visits,I see that money spent as covering most power and water bills combined,if not more.
Is that change in lifestyle really going to kill you?
On a typical day at a local cafe near my office I see people spend anywhere from $7-$12 on lunch,and they have great food but it’s nothing they couldn’t live without. Yes,humans have to eat…but look at the math of buying lunch every day vs. making your own lunch.
$8 x 20 workdays = $160 a month to eat out,vs. roughly a third of that to buy the goods and make your own lunch every day. So there you have around $100 a month to put towards paying off that credit card. You also don’t have to totally cut yourself off from eating out,treat yourself to a nice lunch every Friday. You’re still saving a lot of money,and giving yourself a treat. If you happen to have one of those jobs with bad Monday’s switch your treat from Friday to Monday to make your day a bit better. Since you’re saving money,go ahead and splurge a little and treat yourself to a really nice lunch.
With some of the basic savings advice above the money you would save would easily give you a chance to double or triple a credit card payment. Try it for a month,it surely won’t cost you anything so see how much you save. Remembering the saying from my first grade teacher on math problems,“always do the easy problems first,then go back and work on the hard ones”the same rule can be applied to debt…pay off the small debts first,then go back and work on the larger debts. You’ll also feel better about the debt since one or two large debts hanging over your head is much better to manage than a lot of small ones driving you crazy.