*This is a collaborative post.
We all know that debt is expensive. By the time you have paid the fees and interest, you can easily end up wasting thousands of your hard-earned cash. Money that could use to help you to buy a nicer car, pay for a holiday or something else you really want.
If you are currently in debt it makes sense to try to pay everything off. Once you have, you will be able to re-channel your repayment cash into buying what you really want and saving for your future. Using Creditfix and the services that they offer, you can soon get to the point where you are debt-free.
However, once you have done that, you will need to take steps to keep things that way. If you don’t do that you will soon find yourself in the same negative cycle.
The best way to avoid going the painful process of freeing yourself from debt is to gain control over the way you spend your money. This is now surprisingly easy to do. There are now plenty of apps that you can use to help you to do this.
You could use the app that your bank provides its clients. These are useful, but if you have multiple accounts you could end up having to sign into several apps, every day. Plus, at some point, you will have to pull all of that information together to get a full picture of your finances. That will probably mean spending time keying everything into a spreadsheet. Another time-consuming process you could do without.
Fortunately, it is now possible to get your hands on apps that enable you to keep track of all of your accounts in one place. This review article tells you about the best of them. Yolt and Money Dashboard apps are particularly good.
Within a few weeks of using one of these apps, you will glean useful information from it. You will be able to see exactly how much income you have and where much of your money goes.
Once you have that information, you can take a critical look at things. You will likely be very surprised at how much money you are wasting.
For example, a surprising number of people have multiple online subscriptions for newsletters that they never read. It is things like this that are punching holes in your finances. The good news is it will take you just a few minutes to cancel them and stop wasting that money.
Better still you will be able to redirect that cash into paying off some of your debt faster. This will save you money because you will be paying less interest.
Later, once your debts are cleared up, you will be able to send that cash to a savings account. Once you reach that stage, you are well on your way to never having to get into debt again. When you have savings you no longer have to take out loans to cover the cost of important life events or large unexpected bills.