How to Get Credit Card Debt Relief

Video Transcript

"My name is Julie Asti. I am a Certified Financial Planner with Asti Financial Management and today I am going to talk about how to get financial credit card debt relief. There are a few things you can do if you have credit debt that is already in your portfolio that you are looking at and you would like to eliminate. Obviously the main goal is going to be to get the debt completely paid off and paid down so there are a couple of things you can do. The first is to try to see if you can get your budget in line so that you can have more money available to put towards paying the credit card debt. So that would be creating a really solid budget where you have excess cash flow that you can put towards paying off the debt and creating a payment plan so that you can pay it off in an appropriate amount of time. If you are finding that you income and your expenses are tight such that you can't get excess money to be able to pay down the credit card debt you may want to look at using savings. If you have credit card debt that is costing you 21% and you pay it down with some savings that you have then in a sense you have been buying yourself a 21% return to yourself and you are also going to be eliminating that monthly amount that you have been paying so try to see if you can use any excess savings to pay down the debit. If that is not a possibility you may want to take a look at borrowing from a friend or a relative purely to get the high interest debt paid down and then make a more reasonable payment plan with a friend or a relative that may have a little bit lower interest rate that you can negotiate and set some terms and you can get the debt really paid down. If that is going to be a problem or you don't have anybody that you can borrow money from another tact that you can take would be to take a look at other credit card offers. It is not ideal but if you can do a zero balance transfer or even a low fixed rate balance transfer to another card that will allow you to talk into a lower rate or to a zero rate and really get aggressive on setting a set term one year or two years to get the debt paid down. The last thing that you can do if you have tried to explore all of these options and they are not really turning fruitful for you and you feel like your debt is mounting is to call the credit card company and just talk to them and see if you can negotiate. The credit card companies are most likely not going to eliminate or reduce your debt but they may actually provide you with offers you didn't know existed for example rolling over and transferring your account over to a different credit card with a lower interest rate or working with you on a negotiated payment plan. Their goal is to have the debt paid off in full so they are usually going to be pretty willing to work with you to try to provide some kind of an outcome where you win and they win. My name is Julie Asti. I am with Asti Financial Management and you can learn more about my services or my company on line at www.astifinancial.com."