If you are looking to eliminate debt, you have already reached 50% of your goal because your decision to eliminate debt is the first and the most important step towards you being able to eliminate credit debt. Having said that, it is important to mention that you also need to be firm on this decision and stick to it with complete sincerity and seriousness, till you finally eliminate debt (and even after that).
To eliminate debt, you need planning. This starts with analysis of current situation in terms of your debt and your finances (current and as expected in near future). So to eliminate debt, you need to first check the amount you owe on various credit cards. Just use a notebook to note down the amount you owe on each and the corresponding APR associated with them. Once you have this information handy, you can total up the various amounts to get the total amount of your debt. After all, you can’t eliminate debt if you don’t know how much it is actually.
The next thing is to see if you have enough cash handy e.g. in your various bank accounts, which you can put to use to eliminate debt (of course, you will need to take a view on how much cash you will need to fulfil your day to day and specific future needs). If you find that you have enough to eliminate debt completely, just go ahead and eliminate debt and earn your peace of mind. However, if you can’t eliminate debt completely, check the amount that you can use to eliminate debt partially. Next step, as you must have guessed, is to check how best you can use this amount to eliminate debt (even if partially) i.e. which portion of debt should you eliminate first. So, first eliminate debt on the which has the highest APR and which is hitting you the most. Then eliminate debt on the which has the next highest APR and so on and so forth. If you are incurring additional late fees etc on some of your credit cards, you might decide to reserve some amount to make minimum payments on those credit cards (before you finally eliminate debt on them).
What we have seen is just some basic analysis and first steps on how to eliminate debt. You might need to take some other steps to eliminate debt e.g. consolidation of debt is one good option. However, it’s imperative to understand that any and all methods to eliminate debt will fail if you don’t inculcate controlled spending habits.
