Wednesday 20 January 2010

Fighting Debt


By now, I was really hoping to have cleared all my credit debt from the last few years but I seem to be stuck in a bit of a rut lately and the total is just not going down at all. Of course Christmas doesn't help, but even so, I should have been able to clear the debt by the end of last year anyway.
The graph on the left shows how the majority of my debt has reduced over the last few years (green line) mostly through transferring into interest-free accounts and using any windfall payments to reduce the debt. Annoyingly, I no longer have an interest-free account and all the debt is on my regular credit card (pink line). I think I will have to employ my previous tactic of placing it all on a 0% card again and making sure I pay off my regular card every month. This all goes to show just how disciplined you have to be to pay one of these darn things off. Looking at my graph, there was a point last year when the green and pink lines crossed - this signifies a point where there was just £300 on each card - happy days...
Writing this has just decided me - I will get a credit report done first as I probably have a couple of extra accounts open that should be closed especially as I have opened three new 0% card accounts in the last couple of years. I learned early on that a prospective lender will look at how much potential credit you can draw down off your existing cards before they will consider extending any credit to you, so it is important to ensure that you close all your old defunct accounts. When I have closed all the accounts I don't need, I will look around for another interest-free credit card as that seems a really effective way to pay off debt without accruing any more interest - and then by the end of the year, I am sure I will have paid it off....finally...

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