“It’s not easy, and you should be proud of yourself,” she says. She says each time she paid off a debt in full, she would take a close look at her remaining debt to stay on track, and then sometimes indulge in one of those monthly restaurant trips.
BUILD UP YOUR EMERGENCY FUND
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Once you pay off your debt, the next step should be making sure you don’t accumulate it again. Boyd says one of the best ways to do that is to build an emergency fund, which you can use instead of a credit card to cover unexpected expenses. “If you’re paying $2,000 a month toward your debt, then when you pay it off you will have $2,000 a month in free cash flow that you didn’t have before — that is an incredible windfall that you can put toward another priority like an emergency fund,” Boyd says. “That is the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The article How to Get Traction on Paying OffYour Credit Cards in 2020 was written by NerdWallet and originally published by Forbes .
KIMBERLY PALMER is a credit card and personal finance expert at NerdWallet. She has been featured on the “Today” show and in The New York Times .
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