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You need to read this if you ran up a big credit card bill over the holidays.
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The holidays are a time to make family memories. Unfortunately, the holiday season is also a time of year when many people overindulge in shopping and end up charging a lot more than they planned on their credit cards.
If your bills have started coming in and you’re dismayed about the balance due after your holiday spending binge, here are some steps you can take to try to pay off what you owe ASAP.
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1. Consider getting a side gig
If you want to make real progress in paying off your credit card debt, you’ll need to send as much extra money as you can to your creditors. Getting a side job and making extra money is a great way to do that.
If you work as much as you are comfortable with for a short time, you can bring in a ton of extra cash and send that right to your creditors so you can avoid being stuck with your debt for months.
2. Use your tax refund
If you’re due a tax refund this year, consider using the entirety of it to pay off what you owe — or at least pay it down dramatically. Making a big lump sum payment could perhaps wipe out your balance or at least enable you to make real progress on it.
3. Make drastic temporary spending cuts
If you’ve found yourself in debt, dramatically reducing your spending temporarily can free up cash to send to your creditors. You don’t have to permanently give up everything that makes life fun, but opting out of dining out and slashing entertainment expenses for a short period of time could help you get out of the hole quickly.
4. Refinance your cards to cheaper debt
If you don’t think you can pay off your credit card debt right away, you may want to think about doing a balance transfer. A balance transfer involves getting a new card and transferring your current credit card balance to it. The new card should be one offering a 0% promotional interest rate on the balance you transfer over.
There’s an upfront fee when you do a balance transfer (usually around 3% to 4% of the balance). So it’s not worth doing this if you’re going to pay off your cards pretty quickly. But if you’re paying a very high rate on your current debt, most of your monthly payment could be going toward the interest rather than paying down what you owe. A balance transfer could fix that by giving you a long time — usually around 12 to 15 months — to pay 0% interest.
Paying the upfront fee in order to avoid future interest charges could be worth it if you think you can pay down the debt by the time the 0% rate expires. Just be sure you have a plan in place to do that.
By trying out these four steps, hopefully you can put your holiday debt behind you ASAP so you can start working on other important financial goals in 2023.
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