You are probably familiar with this feeling: Your bills are constantly piling up, but you feel so far behind that you simply cannot bear to even open them. When you do open them, you quickly realize that there is only enough saved up in your bank accounts for you to make the minimum monthly payments and nothing more. You have plenty of other company all over the country. The average family in America is carrying between $8,000 dollars and $9,000 dollars in debt on their credit cards alone. As a nation, we owe more now on our cars, our homes and our educations than any prior generation. Luckily, there is a lot that you can do in order to improve your own unique debt picture. In fact, the following plan is going to help you eliminate your debt, or at least tackle a very large chunk of your debt in a matter of mere months.

This is part 1 of a 4 part series on getting out of debt quickly. Make sure that you read all four parts in order to get the most out of this sequence of hints on getting yourself or your family out of the debt trap.

Step #1 - First and foremost, you need to take stock of where you are at.

You need to either sit down at your computer or with a pen and a notepad, and you need to begin to make a list of all the people and places that you owe money too, how much is owed, and what interest rates are being paid on each of the debts that you are currently carrying. The main culprits are likely going to be your credit cards. The credit cards featuring the highest rates of interest are the ones that are going to be costing you the most amount of money, especially if you are only paying the minimum amount that is due every month. These are going to be the debts that you are going to want to work on first.

Step #2 - The next thing you will want to do is to attempt getting better deals on your credit cards.

Here's what you need to do: You need to pick up your telephone and call the toll free phone numbers located on the backs of each of your credit cards. When you get a hold of a person, you need to speak to the customer service representative to find out if there is anything that he or she can do in order to help you lower the current interest rate on the credit card. Surprisingly, more than half of all times you are going to be able to achieve success with a single, solitary phone call according to some studies, so why not try it? The worst that could happen is that they cannot help you - But the odds are good that they can.

Continued in part 2.

Photo Credits: reds on tour

Originally posted 2009-09-25 03:16:53. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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