At this point you have set up an automated system which takes care of your monthly expenses in addition to paying your credit card payments on time. This will ensure that you never miss a payment and incur any kind of late fees, but most importantly it ensures that you don’t miss a payment to your credit card/loan and impact your credit score.

Look back at the last article: Automate your payments to see the amount of income left that you have each month and ask yourself, can I increase my monthly payment? Are you paying $60 on your $3,000 credit card debt each month because it’s the minimum payment? Do you realize how much time it’s going to take you to pay off the debt as a whole? And most importantly how much interest you’ll be paying?

Let’s run a quick comparison on 2 ways to tackle this debt. One will be paying the monthly minimum in this case ($60), vs. increasing the monthly payment to ($160). Here’s how they compare:

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• When paying $60 a month on a $3,000 loan at 18%, It will take you approximately 97 payments and close to 8 years to pay off your debt and you’ve thrown away $2,587 in interest (almost as much as your original loan!).
• When paying an additional $100 or ($160) a month on a $3,000 loan at 18%, it will decrease to 23 payments and close to 2 years to pay off your debt, and you’ve paid only $549 (which is still quite a bit of money to throw away), but it’s better than $2,587.

Hopefully now you understand why we should get aggressive at paying off our debts. It will allow us to get to an investment state which is where we want to get to. I’d suggest you visit this site and enter your current loan or credit card debt to calculate the amount of time it’ll take you to pay it off:

I hope you learned something new from this blog series or at least it opened your eyes to your own finances. The point of this is for you to take a look at your own finances and see where you might be wasting your hard-earned money and try to change that aspect of your life. There are plenty of ways to slip off such as late payment fees or overdraft fees that we can easily address; however, this is easier said than done. I hope these last few blog posts have sparked an interest for you to take action now rather than later and address your personal finance challenges.