If you are a college student in debt then you have come to the right place, I was once in your position and can understand what it feels like. When you are in debt you feel like their is a constant weight on your shoulders that never moves and it stresses you out daily. You need to do something about this debt because it is not healthy for you and mental stress has shown in recent studies to link highly to physical stress and illnesses. Are you going to risk your mental and physical health just for some debt? If not, carry on reading.
You have to get into your power. What I mean by this is you have to understand that you are the one that is on control of your debt and how it is going to be taken care of. Nobody is going to come along and do it for you. Step into your power like all good people do. Now, take total responsibility for how you accumulated that debt even if you feel that it was not your fault, you are going to have to pay it off legally right so why resist the inevitable?
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You now have to decide what you are willing to do to get rid of the debt, are you willing to go without luxuries that are not essential in your life. Maybe to get rid of your college student debt you would rather pay it off over a long period of time which is fine but I prefer to remove the bandage quickly and just get it over with and out of the way.
If you follow my line of thought then there are a few ways to do it. One of them is to pay all of your debts off at once. This is hardly ever possible as students do not tend to be the most rich people in the world so we will not spend much time on this part.
Another way is debt snowballing. This is the process of getting all of your debts in front of you so you can see how big each one is and how long it will take to pay off based on the interest rate. You then put them in order from the smallest one to the biggest one. The idea now is that you pay off the bare minimum on all of the bigger debts and pay as much as you can off the smallest loan. You will get a debt paid off quicker that way and as you get better at doing this you will feel more motivated to keep paying off the bigger and bigger debts. This is in contrast to paying off the bigger debts first which will keep you not motivated and it feels more difficult.
A way that lots of people are using nowadays is debt consolidation. This is when you get all of your debts together and sell them to a company, you no longer owe all of the smaller companies anything but you owe the one bigger company the combined previous debts. The obvious benefit here is one payment which is much more simplified than the paper work that comes with paying off lots of little debts. Another advantage is that you get a fixed interest rate which means that in unstable economic times you will always get to pay the same amount. If you do have or have in the past had credit cards then you will know that their interest rates vary a lot and can lead to financial headaches.
I love debt consolidation because it is so simple. Yeah, you have to pay a little more in the long term but is it not worth the simplicity and peace of mind? You just set it up by direct debit and it goes out of your wages and every time you look at your debts they have gotten smaller plus the paper work is virtually non there at all or at least its gone down by a huge amount.
Young people should not be thinking too much about debt as they are the ones who have the ideas that are going to change our generation and are the future. Don't you owe this to yourself to get this sorted out now?
