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Post-holiday Remorse
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Opening gifts is a ton of fun. Opening the resulting bills is not. Yet every holiday season millions of consumers use their credit cards to finance gifts they don’t have the cash to pay for. Come January, those bills start rolling in and a strong case of post-holiday remorse sets in. To help you get a handle on their situation, consider the following.
- Realize that there are only two legal ways out of debt – cutting expenses or increasing your income. Decide which works for you and truly commit to it.
- Create a damage sheet. List the names of your creditors, amount owed each and current interest rate, then total it all up. Update that sheet monthly and tape it wherever you will see it regularly.
- Create a budget and a repayment plan. Track your expenses for one month so that you can be sure every expense is included.
- Periodic expenses can break a budget so allocate an hour each Sunday to address your finances. Staying on top of your expenses will help you stay in budget.
- Shelve your credit cards. Take them out of your wallet and leave them at home. In fact, store them with your damage sheet to remind you of your balances. If you have to use credit, don’t charge anything you can’t pay off within 90 days.
- Pay off the credit cards with the highest interest rates first.
- If you can’t make a dent in your post-holiday debt, consider credit counseling from a reputable source such as Money Management International (www.moneymanagement.org).
Treat this year’s holiday charges as a learning experience and resolve to do better next year; so that in January 2004, you can focus on starting the new year debt free.
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