My daughter got in debt while she was in college and she used the Consumer Credit Counseling service. It didn’t cost her anything, it’s not a loan consolidation thing. Anyway they negotiated with the credit card companies and she only had to pay for what she bought, not the interest. And it seems like one of the credit card companies allowed her to pay back 80 cents on the dollar. That was quite a savings, too.

The problem with paying them off over time, especially if you’re just paying the minimum is that by the time you pay all that interest on the unpaid balance you could’ve bought a house or something!

I support Mick’s answer, but want to add more detail to his advice. Laddering (sometimes called “debt stacking”) is the quickest way to get out of debt – but it starts off slow and painfully. The good news is that it starts accelerating as you pay off each debt. It works like this:

As Mick said, pay as much extra as you can towards your debt with the highest interest. Continue to pay the minimums on your other debts. This will get your highest interest rate debt paid off a little earlier than scheduled.

Now here’s the good part. Use the amount of money that you were paying towards the debt you just paid off and add that onto the minimum you were paying towards your next highest interest rate loan. This will greatly accelerate the payoff of that loan.

Then, keep doing with this with each loan as you pay off the previous one. Apply all the payments from the previous loans to the next loan in line and you will be out of debt long before you imagined.

All along, you are paying the same amount, in total, towards your loans but each successive loan gets a larger monthly payment.

If you can get through the painful initial stages, this option is much better than spending money on credit counseling or debt consolidation.

You can use this credit monitoring service to pre-estimate future scores for different scenarios of such payments – credit-report-score.10001mb.com