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Debt is something that everyone will experience, and it will likely follow you through life until you finally get to the point where you can pay it all off, however long that might take. But debt isn’t just a fact of life, whether credit card debt or student loans, it can also have a severe effect on your mental and physical well-being, which is why it is vital to try to escape and free yourself from debt.

Pay Off More Than The Minimum

One common reason that people struggle to escape debt is that they will only pay off the minimum amount each month, and if you’re working with thousands of dollars in credit card debt, 20 bucks every month is not going to make much difference. Even paying twice the minimum will slash the amount of time you need to repay in half, so if you can afford to do so, consider changing your monthly payment to slightly more. Ideally, you want to pay off as much as possible while still having money to live and save, but if you can double, triple, or quadruple your monthly repayment, you will free yourself from debt much faster.

Snowball It

Snowballing is a technique where you analyze your finances and identify what you owe. They start paying off the smallest costs to reduce the payments while still making minimum payments on everything else. Once the smallest debts are paid off, they move to the next and so on until they are only left with the most substantial charges. While there is still some way to go, they at least don’t need to worry about defaulting on payments, and all of their excess funds can go directly into paying these charges off, which will speed up reducing the balance.

Cut Your Expenses

We all have expenses that we deem necessary to survive, but the reality is often quite different from this. It’s possible you have plenty of monthly charges for services you don’t even use, so you’ll need to get rid of these before anything else. Once you have achieved this, consider things you could cut out of your daily life, such as a morning coffee from Starbucks, or even your cable TV, especially considering you can access unjust information about everything online nowadays.

Seek Lower Interest Rates

Seeking lower interest rates from your lender is something many people explore when they cannot handle the extortionate interest rates. Considering Mark of Freedom says all banks are a scam, high-interest rates are no surprise. However, some lenders may take pity on you and allow you to negotiate a reduction to help you manage your money better.

Freedom

Paying off all of your debt and finally being free is not something you can achieve overnight, but the feeling you will get when you see your credit card balance at zero is hard to beat. It will take time, and it will take plenty of discipline with a few bumps along the way, but with these methods, you can start the process of freeing yourself from the nasty clutches of debt in all its forms.