Either way, you need to find a way to reduce your personal debt that suits your circumstances. Here are some tips to lower or even clear your personal debt.
You must strive to erase and reduce your debts as quickly as possible
Yes, you might be perfectly able to afford your monthly debt repayments along with all your essential expenses (like your home bond, bills and food), however, some of us may be wanting to clear our debts or perhaps just simplify the repayment process.
Slogging away at your debts each month and seeing them only slightly decrease can be extremely demotivating. That’s why it will help to pay more than the minimum payment – if you can. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t compromise your essential expenses to pay your unsecured debts off more quickly.
Check out the free budgeting calculators in the Money 101 budget planner tools. See how much money you will save in interest by simply paying a small amount extra per month. Apply this to both your home and car repayments.
The calculation results will show the reduction in repayment term as well as interest you can save. Be money smart, setup and maintain your budget every month to conqueror your debt.
The debt snowball method
The debt snowball method can really help people who have the funds to overpay their debts each month – but feel they lack the motivation to do so. The basic idea is that instead of focusing on the debt with the highest interest first – as it makes ‘mathematical sense’ to do – focus on the smallest debt.
Overpay your smallest debt until it’s cleared – then use the money you were using for the smallest debt to overpay the next smallest. All the while, of course, you’ll still be making your minimum payments on all your other debts. The satisfaction you’ll get from clearing a whole debt should motivate you to carry on paying more than you actually have to each month.
The best way to clear your debts is to know what you owe, how much and to who, this is the main reason why it is best to have a budget. Your budget will provide you with vital information to make informed decisions. Set up your free budget when you become a Smart Money member here http://www.smartmoney.co.za/
Debt consolidation
You might also find it hard to reduce your personal debts more quickly if you have several different payments to make each month to different lenders.
You could make the repayment process simpler (but not necessarily more affordable) by combining all of your debts together into a single debt. You can do this by using a debt consolidation loan. When looking for a debt consolidation loan, it helps to find one with a lower interest rate than all of your other debts, as well as being large enough to cover all of the debts you want to consolidate.
Pay off all of your current debts with your consolidation loan and you’ll be left with just the consolidation loan to repay each month. So it’ll just be one payment to one lender, with one interest rate.
You may even have the choice to arrange to repay your consolidation loan slightly faster or slower than your original debts. This will mean that your monthly payments will be either larger or smaller respectively. Remember that repaying a consolidation loan over a longer amount of time will give interest more time to grow – and that you could be putting your property at risk if you secure a debt against your house and don’t keep up with repayments.
You can’t afford your monthly repayments
If – no matter how much you budget, scrimp and scrape – you can no longer meet your monthly debt repayments, you’ll probably need expert debt help.
There are a number of different debt solutions available – some of which can actually write off a portion of your debts. However, you have to find the one that’s right for you though. Contacting a qualified Debt or Financial Advisor should help you to get on the right track towards clearing your debt problems.
