ACTION PLAN: Your Debt Payoff Plan w/ The Debt SLAYER System (10:00 mins)
Here’s how to roll up your sleeves and get your debts paid off:
Action Step 1: Create a list of all your debts. This can include money owed on:
- credit cards
- student loans
- auto loans
- medical bills
- personal loans
The list of your debts should include the 6 items listed in lesson 2.
Action Step 2: Hide Your Credit Cards except 1 (for emergencies)
When you are paying off debt, you don’t want to be adding more debt at the same time, in this step is where we stop it and protect ourselves.
- Remove credit cards from your wallet
- Delete credit cards from Amazon Prime, Target and/or anything other retailers that you are tempted to buy from.
- Unsubscribe from all retailer emails that you frequently shop at (or set up a forwarding rule in your email to move them all to a different folder. Bonus points: subscribe using a different email address for ‘subscriptions’ only).
Need some help to stop using your credit cards? Check out this top 10 list
Action Step 2.5 Cut back on your expenses
- Go over the budget you created in module 3 and find subscriptions you don’t use and cut them. The funds you free up can go to paying off your debt
- Find if there are things you can sell to make some more money
Action Step 3 Automate Your Monthly Payment
This goes without saying, but it’s so important I’ll say it anyway.
You must continue to make at least the minimum payment on all your debts while you work to get out of debt.
If you stop paying any one of your debts you could damage your credit score
So set all your debts to have the minimum payment withdrawn from your checking account.
PRO TIP: Set all of your credit card debts to come out of your account on 1 day (preferably 5 days after you regularly receive your paycheck) so you only have to think about checking the payments one day per month
Step 4: Pay extra and Often
Now that you’ve found more funds and you have the minimum bases covered, it’s time to figure out which debt you’ll pay off first.
That means prioritizing which type of debts to pay off first. Here’s the general rule of thumb:
- Credit cards first ( or anything with over 10% interest for example)
- Car notes/personal loans
- Student loans
- Mortgages
If you have multiple credit cards, then we prioritze the credit cards.