Instead of going to a third party, and paying outrageous fees, you’re going to find that doing credit card debt reduction yourself is going to be a lot easier than hiring someone.

I wanted to show you some simple tips on how you can reduce your credit card debt rather quickly, and easily.

Get money flowing in: The first thing that you want to look at is how much money is coming in.  Are you making enough to pay the bills, and have enough left over to apply it to debt?  If you’re struggling just to pay your mortgage, and everything else, it may be time to cut back, and get a side job.  Check out this side job ideas post I wrote a while back for ideas.

Write down every credit card: After you figure out the money situation, the next thing that you want to do is write down every credit card bill that you have.  You’ll want to write down how much you owe, what the interest rate is, and what your minimum payment is.

Here’s an example:

• Credit Card A:   $5,000 total / 14% / $107 min payment
• Credit Card B:  $3,600 total / 18% / $89 min. payment
• Credit Card C:  $2,800 total / 22% / $78 min. payment

Now, this will give you a better idea on where your money is going.  As you can see, just because the interest rate is lower, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a lower bill to pay.

Your payment strategy: The next thing that you want to do is start paying off the highest rate first, since this is where more of your money is going to go toward interest, rather than into your payments.

Now, for our example, let’s say that every month, we can put $600 toward our debt, we will want to make the minimum payments on our other cards, so it will look like this.

• $107 paid on credit card A
• $89 paid on credit card B
• $404 left over for credit card C

Now, keep this up, and once C is gone, do the same for B, while paying the minimum on A.  The trick here is to pay off the highest interest rate first.

There you have it, the strategy is fairly simple, and as long as you have money coming in, and you can pay off your debts, you’ll find the it takes money to kill debt.