The Secret to Managing Debt within Your Budget

Using your budget to strategically manage debt.

A solid budget structure makes it easy to control debt. Most debts are housed with your other fixed expenses – like your mortgage or auto loan are installment debts with fixed payments.

But credit card debt can be a little tricky to house. Credit cards are revolving debt. This means your bill grows as your balances go up. But if you have zero balance, then that bill disappears completely.

If you pay off your debts in-full each month, then credit card debt gets counted as a flexible expense. But if you carry balances over each month, then you may be better off making credit card debt payments as a fixed expense. This means you have to consider your budget as a whole to see how much you can afford to pay.

First, see how much you can afford to pay each month. You evaluate your free cash flow, to maximize the amount of money you have for debt repayment. Then you set this amount as a fixed expense in your budget. The funds are used to pay off one credit card debt at a time, starting with the card that has the highest APR.

So, if you have five credit cards to pay off, you make minimum payments on all four. Then use the rest of your funds to make the biggest payment possible on the debt with the highest APR. Once that debt is gone, you move on to the next. And you continue to pay each debt down one at a time.

If you don’t have much free cash to start with, knock out your debts starting with the lowest balance. Each debt you knock out frees up more cash to focus on the next. In normal circumstances, credit card debt payments should take up to no more than ten percent of your income.