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.