With a challenge like this, first decide what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you want to pay off $300 of credit card debt? Reduce your car loan by $1,000? Pay down an extra $50 on tuition for your kid? Whatever you pick, make it meaningful and specific. I chose a monthly goal: “I want to pay off half of this $500 loan. How can I make this happen?”
Naturally that’s the million-dollar question. You can be aggressive or take a slower approach, depending on your goals, money habits, financial situation, and personality type. I’ve done both—I’ve taken every extra cent in a certain month and put it toward debt, and I’ve reworked my monthly budget to put an extra $25 toward debt in full. In the end it’s a numbers game that’s entirely up to you, but find traction. Get the ball rolling so you feel like your debt is not insurmountable (even if that feeling is temporary!), and you can see tangible before and after numbers.
Find five major spending habits and focus on those: dining out, sticking to a grocery store list, avoiding impromptu purchases, deleting sale emails. Kinda dull and obvious, but that’s intentional—the behaviors you need to change in order to save money, so you can pay off debt, are probably fairly obvious once you look around. It’s just a matter of being willing to put in the work and hold yourself accountable—but when it comes to debt, you’ve gotta start somewhere.
TRY THIS
Think about a financial debt you’d like to pay off, and for the next thirty days, redirect all your “extra” money to additional payments. Take one of two approaches: every time you spend money on something that isn’t essential, immediately put that same amount toward your debt. Or set all those amounts of money off to the side in a savings account, then at the end of the month, put a large lump sum toward your debt.