Debit Consolidation

Debit Consolidation


Debit Consolidation Planning

Published November 13th, 2008 in Debit Planning | 1 Comment »

Now that you have a picture of your monthly expenses and can budget for debit consolidation, it’s time to group them into different categories and find your debit consolidation loan number. Your first category will be the essentials. And by essentials, I mean the bills you need to pay to keep a roof over your head, keep the electricity on, and put food on the table. That means your rent or mortgage, your utility bills, and the money you’ve budgeted for groceries go right up top. And, as a side note, you’d be surprised to see how little money it takes to put together some basic meals for you and your family. Your grocery budget doesn’t need to be extravagant, and you need to make sure you stick to it. Shop with a calculator. I do.

Make sure you group any other bills that are essential to food and shelter in the essential column, and then start looking at your secondary expenses. Gas for your car falls under this. The car payment, unfortunately, does not. Anything that you currently pay for internet, phone, cable, cell phones, and so on will go in this group as well. These are payments that you could potentially do away with if you needed to, some more easily than others. Obviously not buying gas anymore could prove to be an issue, but we’ll deal with that if we need to.

Finally, your credit cards and other debits. List them out with their interest rates and minimum monthly payment, from smallest to largest. Now add up all the expenditures that you must make every month to stay afloat and see if you get that much in from you job or jobs. Hopefully, you make more than you spend. Hopefully you make enough more to put some decent money towards your debits and get them paid off. I’m guessing, though, that you don’t. So now we need to get down to the difficult part: cutting back and getting a debit consolidation loan.

Budgeting for your Debit Consolidation Program

Published November 13th, 2008 in Advice for Consolidating Debits | 1 Comment »

The willingness to change your lifestyle and spending habits is vital before getting a debit consolidation loan, but it’s not something you should fear. You have to understand that you can’t continue to live as you are anyway, so it either has to come to a controlled ending or crash and burn a little farther down the line. I’m going to move forward with this series of articles assuming that you’ve made the right choice, and are dedicated to living within your means.

Now that the switch is flipped and you’re no longer buying everything you see, you need to take a deep breath, sit down, and take stock of everything that you owe, what your minimum monthly payments are, and what your monthly bills add up to. This is important, because it gives you the minimum amount of income that you need to meet your minimum monthly payments and your essential services like utilities, rent, gas, and so on. It will also eventually tell you the size of the debit consolidation loan that you need. Some things, though, are not all that easy to budget for. Your utility bill fan fluctuate drastically from season to season, with your electric bill going down and you gas bill going up in the winter.

All I can say is, you need to take your best guess at it. Obviously budgeting for gas isn’t an exact science, as gas prices fluctuate wildly as can the number of miles that you drive in a week. But, if you really hold your feet to the fire, look at your past payments, and figure out a good average, you’ll be in good shape. Obviously your gas budget will tell you whether or not you can take a road trip down the coast or not this weekend and big things like that, but there needs to be some flexibility to meet higher than expected demand in different areas.