What Can You Do To
PAY OFF DEBT?

The tough economy of the last few years have not been kind to those of us who want to pay off debt. As a matter of fact, the debt of many Americans has increased dramatically over the past 20 years.

The United States has the highest average of credit card debt in the world. Only one-third of all credit card bills are paid in full every month. That means a lot of people in this country are paying a lot of money and getting nothing in return. I call it donations to corporations.

Your goal should ultimately be to pay with cash and not put anything on credit. For many of us, that is much easier said than done.

I had overwhelming debt that just socked me in the gut every time I thought about it -- which was often. All the money I made went toward paying a credit card. Or a car payment. Or house payment. I owed everyone. If I needed to purchase something, I had to use a credit card and add it to my debt.

Debt is the worst four-letter word in the English language. Too many people suffer from it. It causes people to work under stress to support the family. That can burn you to a frazzle after a while.

My wife and I were faced with massive debt and struggled with it for a while. We did the following to try to pay off debt:

1. Move some credit card balances to a different card with a lower annual percentage rate. This worked for a while, but we were still faced with paying more than we made every month.

2. Took out a home equity loan. Tremendous help paying a lot of debt with a lower annual percentage rate. But, we were trying to put three kids through private school in an economy that was getting tougher on us. This was a few years before the recession.

We had to do some more drastic action to pay off debt. There are a lot of programs out there that promote consolidating debt and paying it off in two years.

My wife and I were concerned about damaging our credit to the point that we couldn't purchase anything, even in emergencies. People we talked to had concerns about those programs as well.

Plus, bankruptcy was out of the question. We would pull our kids out of private school before doing that.

One option we decided to pursue to pay off debt was a business opportunity. I saw a business presentation that I got very excited about and thought that this was the way we can finally get ahead.

See what business opportunity we did to help us pay off debt.

It was a network marketing company, which I wasn't too thrilled about. At that time, I only heard that there were a lot of scams associated with that type of business. However, I really liked product and services offered and I thought the risk of getting it started was pretty low. I felt it was something I could do in my spare time and it was going to help the family.

My wife wasn't totally behind me on this, especially when she saw me struggle with it. But, I didn't want to quit this opportunity. My belief in the business never wavered and I kept at it.

Network marketing has its critics. There are a lot of scams out there that you have to check into before signing up with one. However, once you find the right business for you, network marketing is one opportunity where you can earn a great living. The initial investment into many of these businesses can range from $10 to $1000.

Once we started seeing success with our business opportunity, we began a major campaign to pay off debt one credit card at a time. We listened to experts all over to decide the best approach.

My wife and I decided to pay off the card with the smallest balance first. We would pay the minimum balance on all the other cards except for that one. We would pay as much as we could on the card with the smallest balance. Once we paid that card off, we attacked another one.

We weren't concerned about the card with the highest annual percentage rate. We wanted to pay off a couple of cards in a short period of time to eliminate the number of bills to pay.

The important thing was that we saw progress after paying off a few cards. Funny thing was that once a couple cards were paid off, those banks offered us a low APR for a balance transfer. We jumped all over that to reduce our donations to corporations every month.

We used the same formula for the other cards and saw our debt decrease steadily.

We had a few emergencies strike our plan. Our 14-seer air conditioning unit shut down for good in the middle of a hot Summer day. This was a major expense that we didn't plan for. We had to find someone that would accept a same as cash program or put it on another credit card and let the debt grow. After a couple of hours of sweating it out, we found a company that was able to help us. No interest for a couple of years. We decided to pay that bill next to avoid accrued interest after two years.

We were able to get back on track and we were paying off more cards. It was actually fun watching the debt decrease much more rapidly.

In the end, a network marketing business opportunity is what helped us pay off debt.

Of course, this approach won't be the answer for everyone to pay off debt. It does take some work to get any business off the ground. We worked a lot of hours in our spare time to make this work.

Be careful when choosing a business opportunity. I hope you don't believe the ads of making large sums of money in a short period of time while doing a little bit of work. To make money in any business takes some work and effort. Network marketing should be a hobby for you at first.

Most important of all, don't give up your efforts to improve your life. It will take some work and it won't always be fun. But, it'll be worth it in the long run.