Are you ready to pay off your debt but have no clue where to start? Read the first post in my series about paying off your debt, then read through this series until you get to this post, our seventh in the series.
We’re finally ready to discuss one of the potential methods to pay off your debt. Now that you’ve changed your money mindset and your money habits, you just need to pick the method or combination of methods that will work best for you. Let’s get started with one of the most popular debt pay off methods, the debt snowball.
What Is The Debt Snowball?
The debt snowball is a term that was popularized by personal finance guru Dave Ramsey. It’s really simple to follow and that’s why so many people have had success with it. Essentially, you take your list of debts that you owe (remember, you made this list in our very first post in the series) and order it from the debt with the smallest balance owed to largest balance owed. As you always should, you’ll make the minimum payments on every debt you owe.
The key is that any extra money you have left will all be paid toward your debt with the smallest amount owed. This will result in getting rid of some of your debts quickly and give you motivation to continue your debt pay off journey. Once you pay off your first and smallest debt, you’ll take all of your extra money AND the original minimum payment from that loan and pay all of that money toward your debt with the next smallest balance.
Continue rolling these amounts over as you eliminate loans and the amount of the payments you’ll be making will increase until eventually all of your consumer debt is gone. Then, if you want, you can attack your mortgage if you have one.
If you haven’t picked up on the metaphor yet, as you pay off each debt the amount of money you’ll apply to the next loan you’re paying off will increase, much like a snowball rolling down a hill! Pretty cool, huh? While this method is psychologically motivating (you’ll be paying off individual debts quickly in the beginning), it isn’t the mathematically optimal way to pay off your debts.
The mathematically optimal way is called the debt avalanche, which we’ll discuss next week. For now, let’s just focus a bit more on the debt snow ball and the pros and cons of this method.
Debt Snowball Pros
This method is really easy to follow. It doesn’t involve making any decisions other than the decison to follow the debt snowball methodology.
You’ll pay off your first debt pretty quickly (hopefully) and that will give you motivation to pay off the next debt faster.
As you pay off each debt quickly in the beginning, you’ll quickly begin to see the size of the payment on your smallest debt (your debt snowball) grow which is very encouraging.
Debt Snowball Cons
The debt snowball is not the mathematically optimal way to pay off your debt. You could end up paying off a 0% car loan before you paid off a 25% credit card loan if the car loan had a smaller balance.
The debt snowball can over simplify your debt situation when in reality there are other factors to take into account in which debt you should pay off first.
As you can see, the debt snowball method has some great benefits but it has its flaws as well. If you’re majorly overwhelmed and just want to see some solid progress, this method might be best for you. However, if you’re a more logical person who doesn’t need to see a psychological payoff early on in the process, you might want to consider another debt pay off method.
In our next post in the series, we’ll discuss the debt avalanche. The debt avalanche is an alternative to the debt snowball debt pay off method that makes more sense for logical minded people to follow.
Have you ever used the debt snowball method to pay off debt? Did it work for you, or did you prefer another method? Do you have any questions about this method that I could answer for you?
Photo by: ff137 Text added by: Lance Cothern
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