Taking the decision regarding the debt pay off can be tough. This is because, you may not even be able to know where to start from. So, if you are having debt issues, it would be better for you to consider all of the debt pay off options, which you can try out. In addition to getting the details over all of the debt relief option or the pay off options, you will also be required to know the different factors and the pros and cons associated with the different options. One such option is debt consolidation. So, if you have too many debts with high interest rates, and if you have not yet missed any payments, the best option for you would be debt consolidation. However, the question still remains if debt consolidation is at all good for your finance and credit.

Debt consolidation and its effect

Debt consolidation if done right, can help you improve your credit and also help you to maintain your finances, other than helping you through debt pay off. There are some tricks which you will be required to follow, in order to be able to pay down your debts and also balance your finances and maintain a good credit rating at the same time.
So, what is debt consolidation, and what is its effect on your credit and your finances. Debt consolidation is the process through which you may easily be able to roll over all of the debts which you have as a single debt. In addition, as the debts get consolidated, the interest rate on the debt gets lowered too. This helps you with better and easier debt management.

Now, there are two main ways in which you can consolidate the debts of your own. One is balance transfer and the other is taking out a debt consolidation loan, secured or unsecured. However, if you think that you won’t be able to manage the debt payments through consolidation, of your own, you can opt to take the help of a third party professional.

Whichever options you are going to try out while paying down the debts through debt consolidation, you may think of closing down the accounts which are showing zero balance. This can result in lowered credits core, because when you close down the accounts, your total credit limit lowers all of a sudden. As a result, it shows that you are making too high usage of your credit, with regards to the available credit limit. When you use too much of credit, it can lower your credit score. This again can result in increase of the debts, as the APR can grow.

Thus, it would be better to opt for debt consolidation, only when you are aware of all of the nuances. Then only may it help you to maintain your finances and also to improve your credit at the same time.

I have been reading a few articles recently on how to achieve your goals. Some are very old school, however the gist of some of the better ones are:

– You need to deeply desire the goal or resolution.

– Visualize yourself achieving the goal.

– Make a plan for the path you need to follow to accomplish the goal.

– Commit to achieving the goal by writing down the goal.

– Establish times for checking your progress in your calendar system.

– Review your overall progress regularly.

Good advice, which I feel can be very effective, when you are dealing with a positive goal – I want to earn twice as much money as I do now; I want write a book; I want to be able to do 100 press ups. The trouble is, what happens when it is a negative goal – I don’t want to be in debt?

The thing is, when you have something positive you want to achieve you feel good about it; you feel excited and can’t wait to get started. The problem with debt is that you do not feel good about it, it haunts you, it’s hard to get excited about paying it off, you just want it to go away. What are you going to achieve by getting rid of your debt? You are going to get rid of those headaches, but other than that it all seems like suffering.

If we could get ourselves to the stage of feeling positive about getting rid of our debt then all the steps above would become effective for us – the problem is getting to that stage. Do you really want to sit down and face everything you owe? Do you really think you are going to feel positive about it if you do face up to it? For most of it, facing just how much we owe makes us even more depressed than we were in the first place!

If you read into how high achievers manage to accomplish so much you will find that the primary thing they do is TAKE ACTION. If you can just take some small action, one that does not severely affect you in a negative way, but over time will actually show positive results, then, once those positive results appear you will start to gain that positive mind towards your debts. You will start to automatically gain the required deep desire to pay off those debts. Once that happens, everything that people say about achieving goals can happen successfully, because your mind is open and positive towards the goal.

So, to be able to successfully get rid of all debt you need to first get your mind into that positive place where you end up with a POSITIVE deep desire to achieve, rather than the negative deep desire to get out of a mess!

If you want to find out what small steps can help you to change your mind into a positive one about your debt then read my guide, “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt”, available on Amazon in both paperback and kindle form, or press the Buy It Now button to your right – and successfully get rid of all debt.

So in other words this is saying “spend your life sacrificing for your debt, finding money to pay it off that you don’t think you have, whilst also trying to save at the same time. Then talk to people who will just tell you to do the same and not have any sort of enjoyable life at all”. If that doesn’t sound like selling your soul, then I don’t know what does!

As if you are not burdened enough about the debt hanging over you, all you are told is to change your lifestyle utterly and completely in order to get any escape from it, and it’s not a change for the good in terms of having an enjoyable life! Is there not an easier way? Well, I am here to tell you there is.

Before you make that appointment with Satan to sell your soul and pay off your debts, think about what the real problem is.

The problem is you have a big debt, and along with that generally comes many bad feelings which make you more inclined to spend more money than to pay anything off and get your debt under control. This is where the problem comes in. We don’t want to face our debts, and when all everybody tells us is that we have to change our lifestyle , and stop enjoying ourselves, then we are even less inclined to face them.

In most cases, where you are managing to pay off the minimum amounts from your credit cards, or keep your overdraft just about under its limit, the real problem is not the debt itself, the real problem is our own attitude and feelings towards the debt – and of course towards change, especially if it means going without the things we love and look forward to.

I had massive debt. It plagued me all the time. A constant headache. The last thing I wanted to do was face that debt monster, and I was working so hard I couldn’t believe I was supposed to sacrifice all enjoyment to bring it under control. Well, I did bring it under control, but I didn’t sacrifice anything, certainly not my soul!

So what is the key to paying off those debts? After all, you accumulated them, so it is your responsibility to pay them off. The key comes in thinking about how you learnt to walk, little tiny steps at a time. And when you fell, did you stop trying? No, you got back up and tried again.

How does this help with credit card debt? Well, instead of trying to change your whole lifestyle, which brings about all those dreaded feelings, just pay a small amount extra off your cards at a time, something which will not cause you to make big sacrifices. These are the baby steps.

Gradually you will notice that these baby steps are taking you somewhere. You look back and you are moving away from the debt monster. This gives you confidence, it makes you feel good. This is the most important part, you are changing your attitude to your debt from one of negativity to one of positivity. Your confidence is building, so you are making slightly bigger steps and more of them. You fall less often. The next thing you know the dreaded debt monster is way out of sight behind you and you never felt the pain.

When you do fall. When you just have to use those credit cards. It doesn’t matter, provided you keep getting up again and making those baby steps away from the debt monster.

Baby steps. It’s easy. It’s effective. And you don’t have to sell your soul to make it work for you!

If you want to find the best way of making those baby steps to get you running as fast as Usain Bolt away from that debt monster then read my guide, “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” – click on the “Buy It Now” button to your right.

The natural reaction for many people when their credit card debt gets out of control, is for them to bury their heads in the sand and hope it will all go away – I know, I’ve done that! You go from month to month only looking at the bills to see if there is enough money left on them to go on a shopping spree to cheer yourself up, or down to the pub to drown your sorrows. As we all know, this is not the way to handle your credit card debt and give you the positive mindset towards them that will allow you to sleep at night and get rid of those headaches.

So how do we handle the credit card debts? Turning our lives upside down, budgetting and calculating, going without those loved things, is not going to help us feel positive about those debts, you are just going to resent them even more. The key to handling the debts is to initially take small actions towards paying them off, which do not cause you big pain. These actions are not so much geared towards making big differences to your debt but more towards making big differences to your mindset. You see, once you can get your own mind on your side, feeling positive and determined, you will be in a great position to make the sacrifices required to really make a difference to those debts.

When I feel negative towards something, when it is bothering and worrying me, I find it very hard to focus on anything but the worry, and hence tend not to take positive actions towards sorting out the problem. On the other hand, when I feel positive towards something it makes me want to achieve, I feel energised and determined. Are you the same?

The problem is you cannot just flick a switch inside you to change your mind from the negative to the positive. Also, if you feel negative towards something you will look for anything which supports the validity of those negative feelings. So will calculating how much you owe, budgetting and doing without things support negative or positive feelings? For me it just makes me think “What am I working so hard for when I have to go without so much?” I know I created the debts so only I should suffer for them, but it doesn’t stop me thinking that way!

So for me, handling credit card debt is not about facing it and making myself feel even more negative. Handling credit card debt is about doing a little something to improve the situation, which will not effect my life significantly, and hence not magnify those negative feelings. Then, as the results of that little something start to show your mindset will become more positive. As this positivity grows you will want to take bigger and bigger actions towards your debts, at this point you really will be handling them!

So take your first little step TODAY to start handling those headache creating credit card debts, pay a little extra off, but don’t make it hurt too much. And if you really want to handle those debts faster than you thought possible, check out my very simple system, “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt”, available on Amazon.

“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt – With No Pain and Big Gains” is a system for paying off credit card debt which focusses on changing your mindset towards your debt and allowing you to pay off the debt without it affecting your lifestyle. Get your copy from Amazon, available in both paperback and kindle format, or click on the link to your right.

So you’ve taken the plunge and decided to pay off your debts – congratulations. You’ve decided on how much extra you are going to pay off in a month, now, surely, it is just a case of dividing your debts by this extra amount and you will be able to determine how long it will take to have them all paid off completely. Mind you, often this can be quite a frightening number – it takes a lot longer to pay those debts off than it did to create them! But wait, it can be done much faster then you thought possible – you have not accounted for the snowball effect. Furthermore, you haven’t accounted for that snowball effect turning into an avalanche!

Whether you are just paying off an extra amount from your debt per month, or whether you are using my “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt – With No Pain and Big Gains” system, when you first begin tackling those debts you are likely to have a negative mindset towards your debts – they have caused you a big headache for a long time! What you will experience initially is a small trickle, the trickle of those regular extra payments.

The key to turning this trickle into a snowball, and eventually into an avalanche is the mindset you have. Whist you have a negative mindset about your debts – you are worried, you get stressed just thinking about them – it is difficult to even make the trickle happen. If you are anything like me, you would try, then stop and it all builds up again. It is difficult, if not impossible, to just change your mindset at a click of the fingers, you need to start that trickle first (“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” is a system designed to help you change that mindset and get you over this first hurdle).

So, you’ve got over the first huddle and you have started the trickle. Stick with it, and as you see results from this trickle your mindset will start to change. You will feel a sense of achievement, you will start to feel more positive towards your debts and start to feel proud of your progress. It is when this happens that things will start to gather pace in your effort to pay off your debts.

The snowball will start as your debt reaches a milestone. Let me explain how it happened for me.

My debts were big, to me! They were around £50,000 spread across a number of credit cards and overdrafts.When I saw it getting close to a milestone – for me this was a multiple of £1,000 – I became very keen to get it below the milestone – my mindset was positive by this stage. I would check my bank balance and wonder if I could afford to pay a bit extra just to push it down, and it was amazing how often I could. So one day, when there was a bit of spare money, I would pay off a lump sum to push it under the milestone – I felt GREAT! Then I would go back to my regular payments and continue to the next milestone.

Did paying this extra lump sum affect my life? Maybe. If I hadn’t paid it off my credit card I would have spent it on something else, probably wasted it. I never put us in financial difficulty, but I did make us less well off than we could have been. But it didn’t matter, I felt great, REALLY GREAT! The positivity that came to me from passing a milestone was worth a little sacrifice, definitely. And that sacrifice even added more to the positivity of my mindset.

So, with these added little boosts, my debt was reducing even faster than I had thought possible – I had created a snowball!

Then came the time when I was close to paying off my first card – WOW, was I excited. In fact, I was far too excited to wait! As soon as I could get my hands on enough money to finish it off, that’s exactly what I did. Did I consider it a sacrifice? Not at all, I was jubilant! I couldn’t have been happier. For the first time in years I had a credit card which had NOTHING on it. Yippee!!!

The positive mindset that I had created for myself made amazing things happen which I had not anticipated and would have claimed I could not afford. I paid off my first card in record time.

So, with perseverance and a positive mindset you can turn your trickle into a snowball. But how do we turn that snowball into an avalanche? It was when I started to pay off my second credit card that this happened.

Once I had completed paying off my first credit card I was better off. I no longer had to pay off the extra amount from that card each month, I also was not paying off the minimum which I had been paying for years, so let’s go on a spending spree – new shoes, new coat; then out for dinner, yum. Yep, exactly what I would have done before I started paying off my debt in earnest. However the process you have been through to get rid of that debt starts changing your mindset, and suddenly you are no longer thinking like that.

In order to pay off your debt faster than you thought possible and continue along the path to a debt free life, you need to pay what you were paying to your first debt into your second debt – both the minimum and the extra. If you are using the “How to Pay Off Your Debts” system there is a second way which could increase the benefits even more, but for this article let’s assume you are paying on a monthly basis, in which case your second debt is now receiving its own minimum payment, the minimum payment from your first debt plus the extra payment you were making to the first debt. You can see how this it is starting to get to be quite a big payment (wait until you get to the third and fourth debts!), but you know you can afford it, you were making this size payment all the time you were paying off your first debt.

Add to this the fact that your mindset still encourages those bigger payments at each milestone, and an even bigger one when it was almost finished; and your second card will be paid off in super record time. Yippee! Debt Free here we come.

So is this looking a little more like an avalanche to you? Well, it’s not quite over, there is a little more snow to gather on your journey to being debt free.

One thing that often happens with a credit card company is that when they see you can pay off your debts they want to encourage you to spend more. Dangerous you say. Well, you can use this to your advantage.

One way in which they encourage you is to give you a 0% offer on a balance transfer – once I started clearing my cards I had numerous of these. Since we know our debts are now, after years of burying our heads in the sand, in control, why not take advantage of not having to pay some of the interest. When you get an offer like this it is worth taking. Move the maximum you can onto a 0% offer to reduce the accumulating interest, then leave that card until the end (or until the 0% offer is over). Even if you do not get around to paying the transfer off before the 0% offer has finished at least you will have had that period without any interest whilst you focused on other amounts which were accumulating interest – so it has to be a win for you.

So now, not only are you managing to pay off your debts whilst feeling good about them, but you are even managing to reduce the overall amount you have to pay.

Do we now have an avalanche? Can you see how you can pay off your debts faster than you thought possible?

To find an extra £20, £50, £100 or more each month may just seem impossible to you. Your options appear to be to go without some of the things you currently buy – i.e. budget harder or to make more money. It may not seem such a hardship to sell some of those unwanted items, but when they don’t bring enough money and it means considering selling the TV and the sofa then it gets quite depressing. So if you can not make more money selling things, what about earning more money? You could get a part time job which you could go to after that long day at your main job, just to find the tax man takes 50% of it before it ever gets to your card debt! You could start up a little side business selling Mama’s homemade ginger cookie recipe – how much do you think that is going to make? The problem is, most of us think we work hard enough as it is, without having to do yet another job in the little free time we get.

Your credit card debt is no doubt already a big headache to you. Having somebody tell you to change your lifestyle completely, as the only solution to paying off these debts, only serves to make the headache even bigger. The barrier to us achieving our goal comes, not in the issue of the solution, but in the assumption of how we must implement that solution. Let me explain.

PROBLEM: We want to pay off our credit card debt

SOLUTION: To pay off our credit card debt we must pay off more per month than the minimum.

ASSUMPTION: To pay off more from our credit card debt per month than we do currently we must change our lifestyle (generally spend less or earn more)

The solution seems very robust, I don’t know if you have a little miracle up your sleeve, but I cannot see any other way of legitimately paying off a debt other than paying off more each month than the minimum.

But what about the assumption? Well, at first sight that seems pretty robust too. But what if I tell you that with a credit card requiring a minimum payment of £100 per month; which I had been paying at that level for a long time, probably years; I found a way of paying an EXTRA £300 per month off the debt. AND I did not notice any lifestyle change other than having a lot less headaches, and feeling very positive towards my debts. I challenged that assumption, and I won!

Furthermore, after a while everything snowballed, and in less than a year, somehow, and it still astounds me now, I was managing to pay off an EXTRA £900 per month from my credit card debt (by this time I was tackling the really big debts!)

“How is this possible?” I hear you gasp. Well, there is one main thing you need to understand before you can understand the way I challenged the assumption. As humans, we do not generally like negativity. If what we are trying to face – a huge credit card debt; having to spend less; having to work harder; having to sell our belongings – makes us feel negative (and I think that’s enough to make anybody feel negative), then we can tend to want to shut down. It is difficult to get motivated with a massive weight like this on our shoulders. If, however, we feel positive about something, then it is easy to get motivated, and to even make sacrifices.

So, if we can change our mindset from negative to positive towards our debt, then we stand a chance of getting somewhere. I hear you, “how on earth do we do that?” The key is in tiny steps, steps which do not give you any negative feelings and do not effect your lifestyle, but will eventually turn your mindset from negative to positive.

When I was paying an extra £300 per month off my credit card bills, surprisingly enough I did not notice any lifestyle change – and before I started I would have sworn blind I could not have afforded this much extra every month. When I was paying £900 a month extra off my debts I’ll be honest, I did notice it, but by this time my mindset was VERY positive (I’d already cleared three of my cards) and any sacrifices I made I was more than happy with.

So the answer to “Should you be paying more off each month?” is definitely YES – how else will the amount go down? But, to be successful with no pain and big gains, what you need to question is the underlying assumption:

PROBLEM: We want to pay off our credit card debt

SOLUTION: To pay off our credit card debt we must pay off more per month than the minimum.

NEW ASSUMPTION: To successfully pay off more from our credit card debt per month than we do currently we must take small steps which we do not feel negative about, and do not change our lifestyle, until our mindset towards our debt turns to a positive one.

“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” shows you a very simple system to achieve this. Give it a go, and start smiling about your debts.

Here’s to success, and a debt free life!

“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” is available from Amazon.

Doing this is something which is recommended by many advisors. The idea behind it is to shock you into action. But does it work?

Well for some people I am sure it does. But for many, many others it creates two big barriers to any positive action towards reducing those credit card debts.

The first issue is actually doing the calculation. You are deep in debt. You do not want to face how much you owe. This is the dreaded thing in your life. With all those negative feelings towards your debts are you really going to pick up a pen and paper, rummage around for those bills, and sit down and make the calculation? Often the answer is, not if you can possibly find something “better” or “more important” to do – I’m sure darning those socks was a crucial, “must do now” activity!

You’re mind knows facing these credit card debts causes you stress. It wants to protect you. Avoid facing them and hopefully the stress will go away – yes, your mind is not always logical!

O.K. So let’s say you are in a position where you really have to face those credit card debts. You’ve plucked up the courage, and you have calculated all you owe – congratulations! Often what happens now is that you find you owe even more than you thought you did – that exercise really did deliver the shock value! Has that shock made you determined to do something about it and pay off those credit card debts? With some people it will, but with many it just puts you from despair to absolute despair!

What has happened here? Your subconscious mind has been protecting you from the stress of your credit card debt by avoiding it. You have then, against its will, decided to face it. Your subconscious mind is now convinced it was doing the right thing by avoiding these debts as you are now not just stressed, but completely besides yourself with worry. All the feelings you are having are negative. The action of calculating how much you owe has resulted in negativity (unless you have managed to implant in your mind that the action itself is a positive step towards reducing your debt, and made this feeling stronger than the shock of the total you have calculated).

So what is our natural reaction to negativity? If you are anything like me I will first try burying my head in the sand and hope it will go away. If that doesn’t work, then a shopping spree can often take your mind off it. And if you still haven’t got over it then a trip to the pub to obliterate it completely can be very effective! We do not operate efficiently in a negative frame of mind.

So what’s the alternative? Is there an alternative? Yes, there is. The key is to approach your debts in a neutral way – positive is very difficult when dealing with credit card debt! If you can approach your credit card debt in a neutral way, with a mindset which is not focussing on the negativity of it (not even facing how much you owe!), and you can take actions which are positive, whilst not requiring you to face any of the negativity or change your lifestyle, then gradually your mind will realise this is nothing to fear. As the actions create results your mindset will turn from negativity towards your credit card debts to positivity.

The biggest beauty is, once your mind has turned from negative to positive it is now working with you to reduce these debts, not fighting to protect you from them. Once this happens your results will soar, and best of all, you will feel great. You will have had none of the pain of facing how much you owe before you were ready to, and you will have big gains in reducing those credit card debts faster than you thought possible.

“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” shows you a very simple system to achieve this. Give it a go, and start smiling about your debts 

“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” is available from Amazon.

This is exactly why most methods of debt reduction do not work. You know what you need to do, but unless you are absolutely forced into it, you would just rather not face it.

Most of the advice out there is around one or more of the following:

• add up all your debts so you have to face them – urgh, how many of us feel like doing this when we are deep in debt?
• budget, stop buying those frivolous “feel good” items – urgh, we’re so deep in debt it’s only the purchase of those “feel good” items that can make us feel better!
• get a part time job to earn more and pay off your debt – what! Are we not all working hard enough!
• sell your unwanted belongings (go eBaying) – sorry, but that is quite a lot of time and effort for something which is only going to fetch 99 cents anyway!
• cut up your credit cards – panic! What happens when things get so tight at the end of the month and we no longer have that card to help us out?

All of these methods are telling you to face the monster you have been hiding from, possibly for years!

The reason these methods often do not work is because we DO NOT want to face the debt monster. Provided there is a little spare space left on those credit cards to buy us something that will help us forget about the debt monster, then we’d rather make the purchase and leave the monster alone.

The key to successfully paying off your credit card debt is to work on your mindset first. This is where “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” differs from most debt reduction methods. It is a system whereby you do not have to face the debt monster at all. No counting up how much you owe, no budgets, no getting another job or selling your body parts to medical science (or eBay!) The simple system works to tackle your debt in such a way that you don’t even have to really think about it.  It focusses on one positive action that you just do, don’t think about it, just do it. The one action should cause no lifestyle change – you can still go on that shopping spree – but if you keep the system up, one day you will find you are no longer looking at your debts as a debt monster, but as something you now feel positive about. This is the mindset change, and once you have this amazing things start to happen.

So why do most methods of paying off credit cards not work? Because they do not tackle your mindset first – the biggest barrier to your behaviour is your own mind. If we tackle this, and get your mind thinking positively towards your debts, then it is your own mind that will take over and make you achieve your goals of a debt free life.

So get your copy of “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” now, and start changing that mindset.

“How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” is available from Amazon.