Thursday, December 7, 2006

Debt Consolidation Loan - Answer Your Debt Problems Head On

If you are stuck at the end of each month with more bills than money to pay them, if you feel that your debts are overwhelming, you are not alone. There are many people who had credit problems just like you and found a way out of them. The "way out" is a debt consolidation loan.

If you think that the idea of a debt consolidation loan is a complicated one, you would be surprised at how simple it really is. Debt consolidation loans were developed just for people like you who feel overwhelmed by the many bills they receive and can put all the bills in one and pay them off at a lower interest rate.

Besides a debt consolidation loan, you can also save money by taking some other simple steps in managing your debt.

1. Organize

The first step in managing your debt is to know where you stand. Nobody likes to do it, but you have to sit down and list all of your expenses and compare them to your income. Even if it does depress you to see exactly where you stand, ignoring your debt problems will not make them go away, and will probably even make them worse.

Once you have all the numbers in front of you, you can start to make the right decisions about how to manage the bills. You can start by cutting out frivolous expenses that you can do without. Once you have a bare budget that will allow you to keep up with your debt, you can start to look at paying down that debt.

2. Consolidate

If you have loans with high interest rates, the first thing to do is to start paying them off. Each time you make a payment on a debt, part of the payment covers the debt itself and part of the payment covers the interest on the debt. Needless to say, the higher interest rate debt gets a bigger part paid on the interest than on the debt itself, so the debt goes down very slowly. Start to pay off those debts by making payments that are higher than the minimum balance.

A debt consolidation loan will bring those interest rates down so you are paying off more of the debt.