As per the latest reports, Americans are ’above their ears’ in debt - $48 trillion - and soaring. 9 out of 10 households in the US owe money - in mortgages, car payments, credit cards, student loans, medical bills, various payday, credit union and personal loans. And unless you are one of those lucky exceptions, you probably owe green. If so, read-on: here are your first golden steps in becoming debt - free.
When dealing with your debt, the first thing to do is to summarize your responsibilities. In another words, understand how much you owe. And in order to do this, you will need a couple of simple things: Microsoft Excel, Internet, a phone and a couple of hours of free time.
For starters, create a new Excel file and password-protect it. Go to Excel, click on “Tools” then “Options”, click on the “Security” tab and look for the box “Password to open”. This is where you are going to put your password. After you have typed the password, click on “Ok”, re-enter the password (for security) and voila, your document is protected. Save it.
Your next task to do is to type in “Creditor” into the first box (A1). Write “Owed” in B2, “Available” in B3, “APR” in B4 and “Minimum Payment” in B5. Save. Next, list the names of your creditors in the first column, one name per row. Save again. The next step is to contact each creditor that you have listed in the first column and obtain as much information as you can. Against the name of each creditor you should fill out what’s owed, what’s available, what is the APR on the credit and what is the minimum monthly payment. Save frequently to avoid loss of information!
After you have everything listed, it’s time to summarize your debt. You will be using Excel’s Auto Sum function for that. Let’s do it with the numbers in column#2, “Owed”. Click on the first number in that column, hold the “Shift” key on your keyboard, and then click on the next empty box underneath the last number in that same column. This way you should have selected all the numbers below the “Owed” column, plus one more empty box. When that’s done, click on the Auto-sum Button which looks like the Greek letter Sigma - “Σ”. This will add all the numbers that you have selected and display the result on the bottom. The great thing about Auto Sum is that if you change any of the numbers in the column, Excel will automatically re-calculate the result! Do the same for the “Available” and “Minimum Payment” columns. Save.
Let’s summarize what’s been done. You have just made the first step towards your financial freedom. You now know exactly how much you owe, what are you minimum monthly payments, how much all those credit lines cost you per month and how much credit you have available. Good job!
Tags:
credit |
debt |
debt-free |
loans |
apr |
autosum |
excel
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