There are plenty of reasons why you need to pay off your debt as fast as you can. The first and foremost is the huge amount of interest that you will have been paying. Credit cards charge a very high rate of interest and if you keep on paying only the minimum amount due, it can take years before you can pay off the debt. If in the meantime, you are using your credit cards, the situation may well be truly out of control. For those who are trapped under a mountain of debt, just keeping track of the bills can be a stressful job. Another major benefit of getting on top of your debt is that you can repair your credit score and get the benefit of easier terms on future credit. If all of these things seem too much to manage, then you should seriously consider using a smartphone debt management app that can help you to become debt-free and allow you to sleep better at night. Some top examples:
Debt Payoff Planner
Compatible with both iOS and Android phones, Debt Payoff Planner is a free app with some pretty smart features that can help you to get rid of debt. The app helps you to create a step-by-step detailed plan on how you can repay your entire debt. Apart from other features, the app also lets you find out the amount of interest that you could potentially save when using the different methods of debt repayment. Since the app permits you to track your debt repayments, you can find out how long it will take to eliminate your debt, and what the effect is of making additional payments, which is a very handy feature when you are battling with multiple debts.
DebtTracker Pro
This is meant for folks who have Android powered smartphones and want a professional app that will let them manage their finances. For a paltry sum of $1.99, you get a very simple and user-friendly interface that gives you a complete and up-to-date picture of the status of all your debts. The easy-to-read screen provides the summary of all the accounts and balances at a single glance so that you know immediately what to focus on to resolve your debt concerns. You can use the specified debt repayment options or customize a repayment method of your own. After you have inputted all the details of your debt accounts and selected a payment method, the app will provide recommendations regarding the repayment amounts that are ideal for each of the accounts. Apart from information on the total amount of interest being paid by you, it makes repayment tracking easier with timely reminders on the due dates.
Debt Payoff Assistant
This is a free-of-charge app for Apple phone users that uses the popular and reliable “snowball” method of retiring debts. This repayment method advocates paying off the debts that are the smallest first and then tackling the larger ones. While the minimum payments are made on all the debts, the surpluses of the debts that have been successfully paid off are plowed into the repayment of the debts of higher amounts. The cumulative action has a snowball effect that makes it relatively easy to tackle high-amount debts, according to a debt consultant at NationaldebtRelief.com, a leading online debt resolution, and management company. While the app does recommend the snowball method since people have already tested its efficacy, it allows users to choose any other debt repayment method or even a combination of the methods. The app has a detailed but easy-to-understand dashboard that displays all debts included in the repayment program, the debts that are still outstanding, the interest paid, and interest saved. The due date notification is standard as is a calculator that shows the date by which each of the debts will be fully repaid.
Tally
Tally is a free app that is both Android mobile app and iOS compatible that has seen a lot of success when used as a credit card manager by people who find it difficult to keep track of multiple credit cards, and different rates of interest that also keep on changing from time to time. Using Tally, you can link all your credit cards so that you are in a better position to decide your payoff strategy. Tally can determine how much you need to pay off every month if you specify a period in which you want to be free of all your debts. The payment plan is optimized for the least amount of interest expenditure keeping in mind the different APRs of the cards. In a marked difference from other debt repayment or money management apps, Tally offers users with good credit standing, its own low-APR credit line to avail for paying off expensive credit card debt. While only borrowers with good credit will be eligible for this offer, the good thing is that all users can apply without the inquiry hurting the credit score.
Mint
No discussion of budgeting or debt repayment will be complete without a mention of Mint. After all, the utility has users numbering more than 15 million at the last count. Usable as both desktop software and a mobile app, the free budgeting tool makes money management as easy as it can get. Apart from budgeting, you can use the app to set debt repayment goals that can be as specific as you like and can include not only credit cards but also all other loan accounts like a student loan, personal loans, mortgage. You can link your bank account to the loans you want to pay off automatically on each due date and also request the app to give you detailed insights into how to repay your debt in the best manner.
Conclusion
Unnecessary debt is best avoided; however, if you have managed to clock up substantial debt that is making life difficult for you, the best way of tackling it is one of the smartphone apps. Many of them are free of charge so you can experiment a bit and find one that you feel comfortable using and then stick to using it in a disciplined way to get rid of your debt at the fastest.
