One of my favorite lessons learned from Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University is the “debt snowball.” As Mr. Ramsey says “debt is dumb,” and good old Benjamin Franklin is on our $100 dollar bill, and he said he’d “rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.”
Chances are good if you are reading this post, you have some debt but you are fed up with it and want a plan to live debt free. An easy way to do this is to implement the “debt snowball.”
List your smallest debt to your largest. Pay only the minimum payment on each debt you have. But send every extra penny to the smallest of your debts. Once you have the smallest debt paid, add the minimum payment from the smallest debt to your payments plus every extra penny you have and start to pay down debt #2, and so on and so forth.
Dave Ramsey teaches that personal finance is sometimes more emotional than logical, and you are looking for small wins fast so don’t worry about which card has the higher interest rate just focus on paying off the smallest debt to the largest.
Here is a link to a Microsoft excel template that will help you build your debt snowball and calculate a payoff date. I highly recommend you buy Dave Ramseys book The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
and tune into his podcast or radio show for encouragement to stay focused on this goal.
