by C Tanner

Created on: October 16, 2009   Last Updated: October 18, 2009

Coming to grips with the mounting debt you've accumulated can be very emotionally draining and leave you feeling overwhelmed and helpless. In today's current economical climate most debt ridden consumers are not in a position to consolidate or liquidate resources to pay off our unsecured debts. As a result the task of significantly reducing or eliminating your debt is something you must tackle yourself. The first thing you must commit to is NO MORE CHARGING. If you can't do this or you're simply not ready to, read no further. If you're serious about getting out of debt, take the following steps.

YOU NEED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE YOU STAND

Purchasing a personal finance program is a worthwhile and necessary investment, Quicken has a an amazing program that will help you track your debts and interest accrued and has many tools to assist you in determining which debts need the most attention. Your first task should be to gather ALL of your monthly bill statements and begin entering each account into your program. Be sure to enter all the account information to include creditor information, payment address, account number and interest rate. Most programs will allow you to categorize the type of debt such as loans, credit cards, liabilities, etc.

Once you've entered each account into your program, take each individual statement and enter into the transaction log the beginning balance listed on your statement. Then enter by date each transaction (purchases, payments, finance charges and bank fees) for that billing period. Make sure your ending balance in your transaction log matches the ending balance on your statement. Repeat this process for every billing statement you have. Be sure to set up categories for your transactions and list finance charges and bank charges in their own separate category.

At the end of this process you will see that your finance program has now calculated the total debt that you owe, in real time so to speak. Seeing this number will be frightening but knowledge and full awareness of your financial situation is the first step to tackling the problem.

1. FIND OUT HOW MUCH YOU'RE PAYING OUT TO DEBT EACH MONTH

List all of your creditors, their due dates, interest rate and minimum monthly payments for each. If you're familiar with Excel it's a great program to use for this task, you can then sort the debt list by due date, interest rate or payment amount depending how ever you wish to view list and it will tally the total monthly payment of all

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