Debt is debilitating and the sooner you clear it, the happier you will be.
Here is how we cleared $1690 of our debt in 1 week.
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links for products and services we use.
1. Decide to Dedicate ALL Extra Money and More to Debt
A huge part of reducing debt is changing your mindset. Instead of relying on debt, decide to clear it and focus on how you will do that.
Often we are tempted to spend the extra income on other things.
Or we pay debt off only to go into debt again.
Decide today to put all extra money you can on debt and not use any of your debt methods again.
This includes AfterPay, ZipPay, ZipMoney, Klarna, BeforePay, payday loans, short loans, any of it!
2. Got Real About Debt
When you review your finances regularly and have proper budget meetings, you can stay on top of things easier.
We had not reviewed ours for a while so we needed to get real with our debt.
Spending was up, investing down and debt barely looked at.
We were in denial about it all and that did not help.
Debt is simply robbing your future self. Whatever you pay for with debt today has to be repaid tomorrow.
So get out all your debts, write them down, decide what order you will clear them in then do it.
Whether you pay off the highest interest rate first or the smallest debt first is up to you.
Keep up all regular payments while you do it too.
3. Bank Bonuses
This week, instead of putting bank referral bonuses in with our regular money, we put them straight on debt.
There weren’t heaps this week but every $5 here and $20 there adds up! And you can get them too.
ING offers $100 to new customers, Up has $15 to $21 and ubank has $10 to $30.
4. Round Up Every Purchase and Account
With so much back to school shopping to do and a few other things, we decided every time we made a purchase, we would round up.
If we paid $47 for something, we would then login to online banking and transfer $3 to debt, thus rounding up to $50.
Also, every time we checked the bank account, we would round down.
So if there was $101.63 in there, we would round down by transferring $1.63 to debt and keeping it at a flat $100.
Doing this made us significantly more aware of what we were spending and we also really liked seeing the debt go down.
If you are absolutely strapped for cash and budget to the cent, this might be harder. Small change adds up though.
Up Bank and others offer this as a feature you can set to automatically transfer to savings. Every time you spend, an amount you choose is automatically transferred.
5. New Income Stream
This is brand new and we are waiting to see how it goes before we share too much information but it produced $320 this week.
It will probably fluctuate for a while but if it turns out to be consistent, we’ll share what it is.
6. Bank Error
We woke up one morning with money in an account that had been empty and no reason why.
It just suddenly appeared and there was nothing in our statements to show why there was money there.
We called the bank immediately, their team went over it and no one could work it out.
Even their digital tech team could not find why the account had shown as zero for so long when on their end it had always had this money.
Once they could confirm, yes, it is our money, we transferred it to debt.
7. Online Surveys
We cashed in a couple this week for small amounts. Check out the best online survey sites here.
How to Clear Debt Fast
For more tips to get rid of debt, check out how we cleared $90,000 in 12 months (starting off unemployed) and 6 tips to easily reduce debt.
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