bless-my-budget.com

this is part 2 of a guest post by Tawra Kellam

How it worked for us:
Once we got our spending under control and paid down a little debt, we began to get better balance transfer offers.
The more we paid off, the lower the interest rates we paid because companies started competing for our business. We were able to finance our $40,000 business loan, buy a car, and pay off medical bills all at 0% to 2% interest.
(Remember, though, if you’re trying to pay off debt or especially if you don’t have your finances under control, you don’t want to buy or finance anything.)
It is really quite simple to transfer credit card balances. It generally took me about 10 minutes every six months. We were able to save over $67,000 in interest with 30 minutes of phone calls.
If we had paid the minimum payment at 21% interest, then we would have paid over $69,000 in interest.
Step 5: Keep it under control!

Don’t be late on your payments!

Don’t make purchases on a balance transfer card.

Don’t buy any “frills” that companies offer with your card. Some companies will try to sell you on the “benefits” of their cards.
Step 6: Keep Track. If you use these “limited time” offers to transfer balances like we did, you have to be really careful that you keep track of when the offer expires. You won’t save money if you transfer to a low rate card and then forget that the rate has gone back up. I keep one small notebook for writing down my balance transfer information.
Step 7: Pay it off! Pay minimum payments on all of your debts except the one you are trying to pay off. Then pay ALL the recently freed money and anything extra you get along the way to the debt you want to pay off first.

The idea is to completely eliminate debts, one by one. Once you pay off the first debt, take all the money you were paying toward it and add it to the next debt. This creates a snowball effect that makes it possible to pay much faster than you might have thought at first.

For more information on this topic, including the step by step process we used, check out the new Winning the Credit Card Game e-book here