It’s now easier than ever before to collect a serious amount of debt. The rise of internet connectivity has made spending easier than ever before and if not done carefully, you can fall into the pit trap of massive debt problems. Frivolous purchases are now just a few clicks away on your smartphone at all times.
If you’re one of the unlucky to end up in a difficult financial situation, regardless of how it happened, there are ways out you can use to bring your financial problems under control in a safe fashion that doesn’t hurt your credit score too badly.
The manner in which you choose to pay off your debt can potentially drastically affect your credit score, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. In today’s article, we will introduce some of the ways that you can consolidate credit card debt without hurting your credit score.
Debt Consolidation
If you’re caught in a situation where you have lots of debt from lots of different sources, you should seriously consider consolidating all that debt. The process of debt consolidation loans means that you are collecting all your smaller debts into a single larger loan that you can more easily focus on paying off. There exist companies that specialize in providing this service, and they should not be underestimated.
If you’re lucky, debt consolidation can drastically reduce your interest of 16% to as low as 5%. This is possible because you’re folding all those smaller debts into a larger single loan for which you can more easily get a better interest rate.
Even though debt consolidation is a powerful tool, you should be aware that it alone is not enough to bring your financial problems under control. There are still a whole host of strategies and tips you should be implementing to help your climb out of debt.
Stop Using Credit
If you’re in a world of financial hurt, then you should be doing everything you can to get out. Continuing to purchase with credit while you’re trying to get out of credit debt is like trying to put out a forest fire by throwing gasoline on it. Technology and rewards programs make it extremely easy and tempting to continue spending via credit cards. You should definitely stop.
One of the greatest dangers that electronic spending presents is that it’s much harder to get a sense of just how much you’ve spent. Without having physical cash disappearing from your wallet, it’s easy to forget that those numbers are tied to real dollars in a bank account somewhere.
It’s an extremely difficult habit to break, but you need to come to terms that a spend now and pay later mentality is unhealthy and could be one of the greatest contributing factors to your current situation.
Tracking Spending
Before you can even consider building a budget, you need to get a solid understanding of where and how your money is being spent. A common way that people fall into debt is that they’re not keeping track of how much they’re spending in comparison to their monthly income. This is an easy trap to fall into since it’s much harder to track numbers than actual physical cash in hand.
Thankfully, there are lots of ways that strive to make it as convenient as possible to log your purchases. For instance, there is a slew of applications for mobile devices that make it supremely quick and easy to pop purchase amounts into your phone. If you can build this good habit of tracking your spending, we assure you that better spending and top savings habits will follow.
Build A Budget
Now that you’re successfully tracking your spending, it’s time to build a budget to hold yourself against. It’s not an easy task, but you need to find the excesses in your spending, evaluate them on a value scale and then cut out the unnecessary spending in your life.
To get out of debt, you first need to stop spending so much that you continue to grow your debt. Then you need to spend little enough to be able to pay off more than the interest on your debt every month. Build a budget and stick to it. The better you hold yourself to your budget, the sooner you’ll find yourself out of debt.
Debt Relief Programs
Besides debt consolidation, the other popular methods of bringing debt under control are debt relief programs and debt management. Debt relief programs are where debt companies negotiate on your behalf with your debt holders to try and get your debt reduced and paid in full in a single and large lump-sum.
However, the use of a debt relief program can negatively affect your future credit since companies now get a distinct impression that you’re unable to handle credit safely. This will lead them to be less willing to lend to you. Also, be aware that your debtors are under no obligation to accept any offer provided through a debt relief program.
The use of a debt relief program from a debt settlement company should be a last resort alongside bankruptcy in terms of paying off debt. Debt management programs are similar to debt relief programs in that they help you negotiate with your debt holders, but debt management programs are potentially less harmful to your credit score.
However, not all debt management programs are free and sometimes you’ll be charged for their services. So make sure to carefully assess if you truly need the help or not.
Conclusion
Bringing your debt under control is extremely difficult but not impossible. The most important thing is to create a sustainable budget and stick to it. Credit companies like to see people that can handle debt comfortably and aren’t extremist in their behavior regarding debt. Make regular payments on time, and any damage you caused to your score should heal over time.
As a final tip, when you finally do crawl out of debt, it may be tempting to cancel all your credit cards just to be done with them.
However, as we mentioned earlier, you want to portray yourself as a balanced individual when it comes to dealing with money.
