 TITLE: How to Manage Your Money CONTENT: Manage Your Debt\n----------------\nManaging your debt is an important part of financial management. These tips can help you take control of your debt and become debt-free faster.\n### Check Your Credit Report\nBy checking your credit report, you can figure out which creditors you owe money to and get an idea of your creditworthiness or how a creditor may view you as a borrower. If you're unhappy with your credit, rest assured you don't have to live with it forever. By taking steps to improve your credit, such as always paying your bills on time and reducing how much credit you're using, you can improve it.\n### List Everything You Owe\nCreate a comprehensive list of all of your debts. Write down all of your creditors, as well as how much you owe them and when your payments are due. By clearly listing everything you owe, you can reduce your risk of missing payments and develop an effective debt repayment strategy.\n### Choose How You Want to Tackle Your Debt\nThere are a variety of ways you can pay off your debt. Three of the most popular debt repayment strategies on revolving debts such as credit cards include the debt snowball, debt avalanche and debt consolidation approaches.\n*   **Debt snowball approach**: The debt snowball strategy involves putting as much money as you can toward your debt with the lowest balance first while making the minimum payments on your other balances. As soon as you repay the first debt, you'll take the amount of money you were applying toward it and add it to the minimum payment you were making on your second-lowest debt.\n    Because this payment on your second-lowest debt is a combination of what you paid toward the first loan and the minimum payment you were already paying on the second, you're \"snowballing\" your payments. You'll continue to pay your accounts off this way and knock out each debt until you're debt-free.\n*   **Debt avalanche approach**: With the debt avalanche strategy, you list your debts in order from the one with the highest interest rate to the one with the lowest interest rate while ignoring the balances. Then you focus on repaying the debts with the highest interest rates first and eventually make your way to the lower interest debts. Using this strategy can help you save a significant amount of money on interest.\n*   **Debt consolidation approach**: Debt consolidation is the process of rolling your high interest debts like credit card bills into a single payment with a lower interest rate. If you're overwhelmed with all of your debts, this strategy can reduce the total debt you owe while allowing you to organize it in one account so it's easier to track. END