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How To Begin Paying Down Your Debt

Sometimes you just don't understand that you're having problems with your debt until its gets out of your control

By Bonnie CharronPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Photo by Daniel Thiele/Unsplash

Millions of people across the US are having debt. It is a huge problem, especially among the students and youth, who owe over 1,6 trillion dollars to the government for their student loans. The pandemic made this situation even worse. For example, here's the story of Molly Webster, who had paid $60,000 out of her $78,000 loan. Despite that fact, she still owed $100,000. And only then she understood, that she has to do something.

"Many nights, the growing debt paced the edges of my consciousness, keeping me awake. At the same time, I knew all the career success I’ve ever had has been a direct result of my education and the loans that enabled it. I continued to pay what loans I could, and for the rest, forbearance. Today, 14 years after my last day of school, I’ve paid $60,000 toward $78,000 of loans. Somehow, I am now $100,000 in debt." - Molly Webster for The New York Times

If you reached the point in your debt load where you begin to feel like you can’t pull out of this, then today is the point at which you can begin changing your future. Many times we don’t make progress in handling our money problems until we are so deep in debt that we simply do not have a choice anymore. Following are some tips that will help you free up some funds to pay towards your debts and help you learn how to solve money problems.

1. An effective option to create more monthly income is to rent out one of the bedrooms in your home. If you’ve got the space available, you can earn decent money by doing this. Many renters cannot sign a long-term rental agreement and are looking for this sort of arrangement. If this seems too dangerous or upsetting to you, try to find a friend or relative to rent to.

2. If you’ve got a car that you are making payments on, consider selling the car to get out from the payment. Use the money from the car to purchase an older, used car to use until your debt situation improves. This will free up your payment amount each month plus give you less of an insurance bill for your car because you won’t need full coverage anymore. As difficult as this could be for you, this could save you hundreds of dollars a month to add to your debt reduction needs.

3. Your cell phone or your landline can be easily let go of. If necessary, choose to keep one of these services but you certainly can survive without both of them. There are a few more dollars in your pocket at the end of the month to apply to your past debt. Eliminating your television services will also save you quite a bit each month. Cable or satellite each month adds up to quite a chunk of money. You can live without it if your debt is taking precedence in your life.

Changing your spending habits is a difficult thing to do. If you’ve waited too long to begin addressing your debt issues, you’ve got to make serious changes before you lose everything. The above items are all things that you can live without for as long as is necessary to eliminate your debt and get back on your feet. Once your debt is taken care of you may find that you don’t even want all of those luxuries back.

On the other hand, you can decide not to follow this advice and just hope, that the problem will eventually go away on its own. But you need to know, that such debt issues have no one-size-fits-all solutions. Therefore, it's the best way to hope on your own and do your best to free yourself from debt.

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About the Creator

Bonnie Charron

Passionate writer, conversationalist. Interested in HR, IR, and economics, but always ready to discover a new topic

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