Defend Yourself From Debts By Paying Them Off In Unique Ways
Debts are troublesome. No one wants them. And if you still have them, then you get irritated.
At this time, managing money-related issues is a severe complication. I mean, Ireland’s suffering a financial crisis like many other countries of the globe. Rising and unfair living costs to poor wages on your day job, there are enough reasons to get stressed and look for an extra income to pay off your utility bills and get essential items.
And when it comes to repaying debts, that’s a problem that will bother you for a while.
But you need to understand something here. And I am not saying this out of the fact that I am a person who’s not bearing a debt right now. I am saying this because this philosophy helped me to withstand my debts when I was charged by not just one of them but two of them.
Read this post to understand how I repaid my debts and made it a point to manage them as effectively as possible.
How Debts Can Still Be Paid Comfortably but Effectively
I made a schedule to sit down with my debt-related affairs for about 30 minutes a day for a week. This has been my pre-debt consolidation plan.
When I was over with it, I remembered a very strong statement my granddad gave me, and that is:
“You never know wherefrom expenses will rise and how they come to you. No matter how tidy your surroundings are, they are likely to be pushed to the state of a dog’s dinner…at least a little. Expenses will find you all the time. Even if you don’t have a debt, you have an emergency.
Even if you don’t have an emergency; you have an investment. Even if you don’t have an investment; you have to repair something big in your home. Even if you have nothing to spend money on, you have got your monthly bills and living costs and whatnot.”
If you read this word by word, then you will realise what a great vision my granddad has. And I was repaying a bank loan and an education loan at the time. I have been a software engineer in a firm. And I realised that income and expenses are bound in a never-ending loop.
We just need to go with it.
So, I arranged my papers and settled down to understand my debts better. I looked at them and considered the time frame within which they would be repaid. I also
took out a legit loan for bad credit in Ireland as a debt-consolidation loan. And then, I was pretty much on track with repayment.
Guess what? Repaying my debts became a habit for me. And that felt good.
Here are the ways I have followed:
- Define Your Debts by Understanding Them
- Do Some Paperwork
- Consider Debt Consolidation Strategies and Choose One
- Reduce Utility to Save Money on Bills
- Think Debt-Consolidation Loans
- Start Freelancing for Repaying Debts
- Look for Help
Without further ado, let us now get in touch with these effective ways in a little more detail:
· Define Your Debts by Understanding Them
How many debts do you have?
Are there unequal amounts and different sorts of interest rates involved?
Is there any urgent debt?
Do you have different repayment duration?
Can you take care of a few debts later?
These are many questions that will come to your mind when you are working with multiple debts. If some of your debtors need the money urgently, you can get confused about repaying the others.
For example, taking care of debt now can result in more financial penalties for the other debts because you have paused them in the urgency of repaying the first one.
So, you need to sit down and relax first. Understand your situation not as you but as an observer. Be organised in your approaches to make your debt management plans effective. Also, consider your income for this.
· Do Some Paperwork
Creating a spreadsheet on your laptop or phone about repaying your debts is better.
Spreadsheets not just help to keep track of your expenses, but they also make your debt consolidation much more organised.
You probably already know that people nowadays keep track of their expenses in digital spreadsheets.
You get Microsoft Excel, to begin with, or Spreadsheets made by other developers. You can access them on mobile platforms, too, due to a large number of apps.
You would definitely need to use one of them in the online realm. I recommend keeping an offline version of the spreadsheet as well.
With that, I want to add an advanced idea.
And that is to use budgeting or a finance app. You may use Mint for that. Both individuals and businesses have acclaimed it. If used correctly, it can save you money too.
· Consider Debt Consolidation Strategies and Choose One
See, the type of strategy you will choose is wholly based on the kind of debts you have.
Here, I am going to state two standard practices used in the world. I have used the first one of these two personalities.
And that is the snowball method. Just like a snowball starts rolling small; but eventually gets larger over time, accumulating more snow as it descends, you can start off by paying off the smallest debt and then gradually go for repaying the ones with more significant amounts. Psychologists say it makes you feel rewarded and content to pay off debts.
The following method is called the debt avalanche. It is kind of the reverse form of the snowball method. You pay off the highest debt while making minimum payments for the smaller ones. In this way, you can get over the debts a little faster.
· Reduce Utility to Save Money on Bills
If you use the app Mint and look at your expenses yourself, then there are many ways you can use to reduce bills.
Reducing utility bills and overall expenses will help you find out a decent value for your income. You can realign living styles and identify things you may and unwillingly have been spending merely out of impulse.
Here’s what you can do:
- Understand your priorities
- Go for the cheapest services as long as they can get the job done
- Stop paying or subscribing for the services that you actually don’t use
- Understand the value of being frugal
- Look for free goods and services
- Stop impulse buying (if you do have that habit)
And you’ll see you are rewarded with quite a lot of money at the end of the month or week.
Use this money to help your debt consolidation process.
· Think Debt-Consolidation Loans
A good way to consolidate debts is to look for a personal
online loan in Ireland.
Direct lenders offer these loans, and there are loans for debt consolidation purposes as well.
Like other personal or unsecured loans, a debt consolidation loan from a direct lending service is also an unsecured loan, which you can take out to repay your debtors without needing collateral.
If you choose a direct lender, you won’t be troubled by a bad credit score. Some borrowers don’t want guarantors to take out a loan of this kind as most debt consolidation loans are supposed to bring a guarantor with the borrower. But a direct lender can offer you a loan as simple as a personal loan or a bad credit loan is offered.
What it does is that a single loan for debt consolidation brings all the other loans into one place, giving you one interest rate and repayment duration. It thus works in your favour to minimise confusion about repaying multiple debts with several rates.
· Start Freelancing for Repaying Debts
If you choose to freelance, you might get a better advantage in debt consolidation.
You can say that the concerned debts have a certain amount for you to repay. Chances are you have also made calculations on that. Now, if you start working from home part-time or consider freelancing, it may aid you with some money you can solely devote to repaying your debts.
Yes, it is going to be a little hectic for you. But look at the bright side. You will get a chance to learn a new skill or gather more professional experiences to add to your CV.
- Create an account on sites like freelancer (its free), fiverr or Upwork, where you can find freelancing projects to work on. You will also find various tasks there and choose one to make your move.
- You might find contractual work from non-profit organisations.
- You can try teaching what you know. Create masterclasses online. Take the help of academic sites like Udemy, Skillshare, Unacademy, Khan Academy or Coursera and upload your course program. You can teach people when they would buy your services.
- Find a part-time job online or offline.
- You can ask your employer to extend work in a part-time way.
- Start a business you have been waiting to do for a long time.
And use this money to repay your debts. You can also choose to continue this side hustles if you are okay with the workload and enjoy the work.
· Look for Help
If you are facing strict money problems, then you can get help.
Search for it, and you may find what you are looking for.
- Many government programs can help you with monetary matters.
- You can be entitled to benefit programs. Visit the governmental sites to check about that.
- If you find areas or providers offering you free goods and services, you can save that money and use it for your debt consolidation.
- You might also find non-profit organisations to help people in need.
As mentioned earlier, if you seek help, you can get some. So, don’t stop looking for it.
To Conclude
Now that you know how I have consolidated my debts, I reckon you should do the same.
Just be patient and don’t stress yourself.
And remember my granddad’s words.
