Hey Taylor - I’ve been stuck in a debt cycle for too many years. I pay my student loans, and then I don’t have money for groceries so I have to pay them on my credit card, and then something happens to my car, and on and on and on. What’s the fastest for me to pay these debts off once and for good?
Hey Annmarie - The debt cycle is a very real and unforgiving problem. After a few years of living with student loans and credit card balances, you probably feel like that’s how life will always be. I promise you can get your head above water, but you have to accept there’s no easy solution. It’ll take some time, but you’ll start feeling relief pretty quickly once you commit. That said, here are the three fastest ways to make it happen.
Pay down your debt. You expected something more creative? If you’ve got debt you want gone, you have to pay it down. I understand that this is the whole problem—between the student loans and credit cards, it feels like you don’t have enough money to pay the bills. This is where the creativity comes into play. Through a combination of reduced spending and targeted debt repayment, you need to start nixing one balance at a time. Go after the smallest balance and clear that out, then start aggressively paying off the next card. As the little debts disappear, the bigger ones start to look less overwhelming.
Consolidate/Refinance. This trick is available to everyone with a decent credit score and it works really well. Some other debt collector would be happy to take lower interest payments if it means stealing your balances away from another lender. Check out Splash Financial or ask around to see what refinancing companies your friends have used. If you’re looking to get out of debt fast, few things work as immediately as lowering your interest rates in a single afternoon.
Make more money. How dare I, right? You’re already working your butt off and now this Kovar guy is saying just make more money? Yes. Yes I am. Because even pulling in an extra $100 a month will help you break out of this cycle, and you can probably make that much having a monthly garage sale. Sell things you don’t need, pick up odd jobs, do whatever it takes to make a little extra and put that money toward your debt. One way to earn more is getting a new job with a higher salary; the other way is to side hustle with the strict intention of paying down debt.
Here’s the TLDR version: the fastest way to get out of debt is to make a plan for how you’re going to do it. It might be a three- or five- or ten-year plan, but having that strategy in place will definitely speed things up and eventually break the cycle. Good luck, Annmarie!
