How to Pay Off Your Debts Faster Than You Thought Possible

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?

If you want the system to pay of your credit card debt faster than you thought possible, with no pain and big gain, check out “How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt” at http://suemaddock.com/howtopayoffcreditcarddebt/, or get your copy in Kindle or paperback from Amazon.