I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas. It's been a crazy year with many ups and downs for all of us. The world has been a pretty crazy place this year, but you made it! Good for you, pat yourself on the back. Hopefully your kids had a wonderful Christmas morning, waking up to lots of toys and new clothes for the New Year.
But among all this joy, most of us are in a little trouble. If you are like most of us you're probably a little stretched now. Are your credit cards maxed? Did you take a new loan for Christmas money? Are you flat broke now and waiting for that first check of the New Year? Now you get to pay off credit cards.
Don't feel like you're alone. A huge percentage of us go through this every single year. But I have good news! Today I'm going to show you how to pay off credit cards, and show you how to have your Christmas money all saved up for next year. I am also going to show you how to pay off this Christmas and pay for next Christmas without using money from your primary income source. So you don't have to be stretched for next year and have to pay off credit cards next year.
The average family has 4-5 credit cards and most of those are probably maxed out by now. The average interest rate on those credit cards is 15.9%. Yours may be higher or lower. The first thing you need to do is consolidate those credit card bills into one payment. If your average payment on those cards is $500, the average payment on a consolidation loan is only $250. That's right, half of what the credit cards are, and the interest rate on a consolidation loan will be closer to 10.9%. I will show you where to get a loan to pay off credit cards in just a minute.
Now with cash in hand its time to, you guessed it, pay off credit cards. Start writing checks to your credit card companies and pay those nasty things off.
Now that you have consolidated those payments into one payment, we have to figure out how to pay that loan off and build a Christmas fund. There are a couple ways you can do this, but let's begin with how much you spent this year. Go back through all your receipts and calculate exactly how much you spent on Christmas. Now decide if you are going to need more than what you spent this year for next year or if you are going to spend about the same. Now take the dollar amount you decide to spend next year and divide it by 6. Why 6? Because that's how much time you have to save that money. The most beautiful thing is next year you won't have to pay off credit cards.
You have 6 months to save next years Christmas fund and 6 months to pay off this years 'pay off credit cards' loan. So if you spent $1200 this year on Christmas, and are going to spend $1200 on next Christmas, You need a total of $2400 to pay off the loan you just took out and pay for next years Christmas. So all you have to do is save $200 per month and this years Christmas will be paid for and you will have your Christmas money saved for next year.
Trust me, this is not hard to do, and it's a lot better than getting stuck at the end of the year with no cash to pay off credit cards.
