Keep a Calendar of All Required Payments
When you have a lot of different loan payments to make every month, the first thing you need to do is create a calendar which lays out all of your due dates and minimum payment amounts per loan. By keeping track of your upcoming payments, you won’t be caught off guard at any time.
Money management is just basic math—addition and subtraction. The numbers shouldn’t ever surprise you. There’s no excuse for bouncing checks, missing due dates and getting stuck with late fees. All of that can be prevented by organizing your calendar and doing the math.
Schedule Automatic Payments
Once you have your payment calendar all set up, the next thing you should do is schedule automatic payments for each of your loans.
The only reason you might be scared by this step is that you are spending more money than you make every month. If that is the case, then you still need to schedule those automatic payments. But you also need to see where all your money is going so that you can cut back on unnecessary expenses and prioritize these bill payments.
Now that your bill payments are all pre-scheduled, and you are keeping a positive cash flow to cover those payments, you’ll never have to deal with another late fee or feel stressed about when payments are due. It’s already figured out and set up to run on autopilot.
Synchronize Due Dates with Pay Periods
If your bill payment due dates are spread throughout the month in a way that makes it difficult to track or in a way that makes it difficult to pay promptly, you can try calling your creditors and setting up custom payment due dates. This is especially helpful if your bill payments are all loaded heavily at the beginning of the month and require more than one paycheck in order cover them.
So what you want to do is put half of your due dates at the beginning of the month to be paid by one paycheck, and then you schedule the other bills a couple of weeks later to be covered by the next paycheck.
Negotiate Lower Interest Rates
If you haven’t already, you should try contacting each of your creditors to see if there is any way they can lower your interest rate to help you keep up with your payments. Many creditors are actually happy to do this because they lose a lot of money when their customers fall behind and they have to charge off those accounts to debt collection companies.
If you own your home and have a lot of credit card bills or other bank loans, you might be able to combine these into a single, large consolidation loan or mortgage payment. By reducing the number of payments that you need to make every month, this might make it a little easier for you to stay organized and to avoid missing any payment due dates.
All it takes is a phone call and a cheerful attitude. You never know, and you just might get lucky. So give it a try and see what they say.
Pay Down Faster with Snowball Technique
The snowball technique is a proven method for paying off multiple debts as quickly as possible. The way it works is that you figure out all of your bill payments, then you make only minimum payments to each of them—except for the one that has either the highest interest-rate or the lowest minimum payment. This one becomes your priority.
So you will choose one of your loans, and make it your priority to pay off that loan as quickly as possible while maintaining minimum payments on all the other loans.
Once that priority loan is paid off in full, you then take the payment that you were making there and add it to the minimum payment on the next bill on your list. By progressing in this way your bill payments snowball, and the bills get paid off faster and faster.
It can be very frustrating when you have a lot of bills to pay off and are trying to get out of debt. But many people have done it before, and you will do it too. You just have to get organized, prioritize your bill payments and reduce your unnecessary spending as much as possible. By following these tips your bills will get paid off in no time.
