Take The Necessary Steps to Pay Off Your Debt

Accountability
3 min readSep 30, 2022

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Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Debt management is a method to help keep your debt under control through financial planning and budgeting. The main purpose of a debt management approach is to use specific strategies to help you decrease your current debt and move toward eliminating it completely. You can develop a debt management plan for yourself or head over to debt management services. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages to them. Setting up a plan for yourself is the easiest way forward, but at times can be helpful to have an outside partner providing assistance or accountability. Debt management services create and address unsecured debts like credit cards and personal loans. Debt management can happen by doing it yourself or with a credit counsellor.

When trying the do-it-yourself version of debt management, you will need to create a budget for yourself that will enable you to pay off your debts and maintain your financial stability. There are a few methods of doing it yourself. This approach is ideal if you struggle with overspending but can afford to pay monthly debt payments by becoming more disciplined. This approach can protect your credit rating by making suitable monthly payments and paying in full amounts. There is also the opportunity to develop a realistic plan that involves goals and a debt-payoff date in order to keep you determined during the payment journey. However, you won’t have insight from an expert who will know and have much more effective strategies in mind to get out of debt in a faster manner. Additionally, creditors may not always be open to negotiations. If you do want to or prefer to do it yourself, you can use budget calculators, repayment equipment and financial management software to help keep you and stay on track. If needed, you can negotiate with established creditors to try and lower your interest rates or monthly payments to help you lower your debt. When the debt is under control, you can choose if you want to keep or close an account.

However, if you choose to go with debt management services, you can have a qualified credit counsellor at your disposal. Someone qualified will be able to help you find and come up with a plan to repay your debt balances and with negotiating a debt management plan. It typically spans over three to five years and includes concessions, which is like a lower interest rate, condensed monthly payment or fee disclaimers, to help you get out of debt faster. Dependent on your situation, the creditor from the debt management services may close your accounts because each debt is paid off to avoid making any new debt.

Having a debt management plan is generally a much more cost-efficient way to get out of debt than paying private creditors directly. You will be able to get a set monthly payment and debt-payoff timelines if the negotiations are successful. Finally, the debt collection calls will stop and the impact on your credit score won’t be as substantial as it will be settled with the balances for less than you owe.

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