It’s time to start paying off debt. Today.

The decision to get out of debt is a big one. Many times it takes a lot of frustration and fear and anger to finally make the decision, but once it’s made it’s time to get down to business and tackle all of the debt that is holding you down.

When you’re just starting out, the prospect of getting out of debt is daunting. It seems like a really big deal because it is, but I think the hardest part is starting.

Really starting.

Really starting means gathering all of your debts together and putting them in one place, so you can get a handle on them and then take action to knock them out.

And you can to that TODAY.

Right now.

Download the Debt Inventory worksheet, and I’ll walk you through it in the rest of this post.

We were lucky when we were on our debt free journey-well “lucky”-in the fact that we only had one debt. It was a $60,000 debt, but it was only one. Many times, people have multiple credit cards, debts in collections, car loans, etc. That makes it difficult to really know the number that you’re starting out with.

Getting all of your debts in one place, added up, and organized will help you take that first step towards tackling them with a vengeance. From there, you can decide how you want to start tackling them. The two most common methods are the Debt Snowball and the Debt Avalanche.

This post isn’t going to go into either method in detail, but simply put choosing the Debt Snowball method means that you’ll list your debts in order from smallest to largest and start paying on the smallest balance first while paying the minimums on everything else. Once the first debt’s paid off, you use all of the money that was going to those payments and put them towards the next smallest debt. And so on and so forth until you’re DEBT FREE!

The debt avalanche means that you list your debts in order of interest rate with the highest interest rate topping the list to be paid off first. The downside to this method is that you’re not getting the quick wins and snowball effect (get it?) of the Debt Snowball.

Either way, if you’ve decided to take stock of your debt, you’ve come to the right place!

If you’re ready to take that first step, download the Debt Inventory worksheet, so you have a place to list all of your debts. It might be good to print out two of them. One for listing all of your debts and then a second to list them in order of balance (recommended) or interest rate.

I’m excited for you to get started tackling your debt today! If you have any questions, let me know!