I was reading a very interesting article about the best way to transfer your credit card debt to another card. This new card carries a much lower interest rate. As a result, you pay less for your consumer debt.
I figured I'd help out with a simple trick I use to make the credit card transfer much simpler:
- Find out your exact balance on your current credit card and how much you pay in interest on it. It's important to understand just how much you are paying in consumer debt charges.
- Find a card that has a much cheaper interest rate or has a cheaper rate for a short period. Take your existing debt load. Estimate how much you'll pay with that credit card. It still seems like a lot of money, doesn't it?
- Pay off the first damn credit card, you are nuts to carry a balance on these financial lampreys. I'm serious, pay off your credit card debt right now!
- Once you have a zero balance on the first card, cancel that credit card, and cancel the second card if you applied for that as well. This makes it less likely to end up back in the position you started with.
Simple, solution isn't it? You thought I was going to write something else?
Ha! Should I forward this to my insanely indebted friends? Is there an anonymous email forwarder I can use?!? They probably wouldn’t appreciate a direct email from me regarding their spendthrift ways but they could really use this advice.
Send it, they’ll appreciate your honesty, and if it causes more people to read my site, so be it! 🙂
Nice and simple. So why do so many not get it?- Cheers.
Sometimes the obvious things are not so obvious ?
Love it! If people spent as much energy actually doing something concrete instead as they do trying to figure out how to game the system so they can keep doing what they have been doing….
However, the obligatory caveat here. You are assuming that people using credit cards actually have the money on hand to pay off the current card or some extra money each month to pay it down. For some people getting the money transferred to a card with a much lower interest rate can mean the difference in years as to how soon they can manage to get the debt paid off, particularly when the current card’s rate is around 20%. I guess in their case the short advice would be to get the money transferred and immediately cancel the other card.
I’d rather they open an Unsecured LOC and destroy the Credit Card as a resolution, rather than shuffling deck chairs on the debt Titanic, by opening yet another credit card.