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Strategies For Tackling Debt – Which Is Best?

March 14th, 2017 Posted in learning about money, Money Tips
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As any financial expert or debt advisor will tell you, the way to approach tackling your financial woes is to take a systematic approach. However, there are a few different strategies you can employ on your quest to become debt free. Some will work well for you; others may not. But how can you tell which is best for you and your finances?

Today, we’re going to go through a broad range of debt-tackling strategies and explain everything you need to know. Let’s take a closer look at some of your options, and – we hope – point you in the right direction for the strategy best for your situation.

Debt Consolidation

Most debt experts will advise you that you should never consolidate your debts – or, at the very least, be incredibly careful about doing so. However, there are some benefits in going down this route as long as you do your research and choose the right path. For example, interest-free balance transfers can switch your debts so that you don’t pay any interest at all for a set period, meaning all the repayments go towards paying the debt off. However, given that you need a good credit score to enjoy interest-free balance transfers, it’s not always an option. In this case, you might try to look for bad credit loans and consolidate that way. Bear in mind that these can be expensive, so it’s important to work out whether consolidation is worth your while. It might be the case that tackling your debts individually is a more cost-efficient tactic. If you decide that this route is better, the following strategies might help.

The Avalanche

The avalanche method is where you pay off your debts one at a time, focusing on the debt with the highest interest – or highest balance – first. Once you have paid off your highest interest debt, you move onto the next highest, and so on. Using this method is thought to be useful as your higher interest debts will, ultimately, cost you more. However, if the debt is large, it can take a significant amount of time to pay it off, and it requires you to put a lot of money towards it if you want to see quick results.

The Snowball

The debt snowball method focuses on your smallest debts first. The idea here is to get rid of your debts in a systematic way, eliminating them one by one and feeling like you are making progress. Now, let’s take a look at some of the snowball and avalanche methods in more detail.

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APR Method

This method involves working out which creditor is charging you the highest annual percentage rate. You continue paying your minimum repayment to all other creditors, and put any spare money into the highest interest charger. Once you have cleared the first debt, you move onto the next – not forgetting to include your minimum repayment. As you pay off each debt, you can take the minimum payments from your old debts and add them to the next biggest debts, ‘snowballing’ your repayment amounts as you go along. By the time you start paying off your largest debts, you should have a significant sum of money set aside, and it should – in theory – take less time to clear.

Highest Balance Method

You can also consider the highest balance method to repay your debts. This strategy can work if you have a couple of big debts that seem impossible to erase. However, if you put every spare cent you have into tackling your most significant debt, it won’t take long to start seeing your results. Let’s say you have $5,000 on a credit card. If you could, for example, pay $200 a month, in a year’s time you will have whittled this down to $2,800, assuming you have managed to freeze all other interest charges. It’s a dramatic impact that has reduced your debt with that creditor by almost half.

Quick Win

When you keep getting bill after bill in the mail, debts can actually start impacting your life and wellbeing. And it’s always difficult to know where to start. There is a solution, however – go down the quick win route. Using this strategy puts your focus on eliminating your easiest debts first – the ones with the lowest number of repayments left. If there are two debts with similar end dates, tackle the one with the higher monthly payment. While this strategy might cost you more in the long-term than, say, the APR method, it will still give you a sense of momentum. And, most importantly, reduce the number of debts you have far quicker than the other strategies.

Low Balance

Similar to the quick win strategy, the small balance method involves tackling easy debts first – the ones with the least amount of money outstanding. Removing these irritating small debts gives you a sense of momentum, and you can then collate all the minimum repayment monies and use them to tackle the bigger problem areas. If you are struggling to pay off your debts, it’s a strategy worth considering as research shows it is often the most successful.

The family loan

Finally, consider borrowing money from a family member or trusted friend. There are a few reasons why this can work for both parties. First of all, let’s take a look at this strategy from your family member’s point of view. If your mom or dad has, say, money in a standard savings account, the chances are that they aren’t earning lots of interest on it. So, you could offer them a better deal over a set period of time, while still enjoying a lower interest rate than you are currently paying your creditors. This strategy is like a super-charged consolidation plan, as everyone on your side of the fence wins – and you get to pay off your creditors in one hit. It’s always worth doing this as the sooner you can repay your problem debts, the sooner you can start rebuilding your credit score and reducing the impact on your lifestyle and borrowing power.

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Start Saving on Family Transport

March 14th, 2017 Posted in learning about money, Money Tips
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When you have a family, getting everyone around can be tricky. It’s especially hard when you have babies or toddlers, who require a lot of stuff. In the car, you need to have everyone in car seats, unless they’re tall enough or old enough not to have one. And when you use public transport, keeping track of everyone can be nerve-wracking. One of the trickiest parts of family transport is the cost. Running a car can be expensive, but relying on public transport often is too. And when you go abroad, it can get costly too. If you want to reduce the costs of family transport, there are a few tricks you can use.

Look Into Family Discounts on Public Transport

Many families use public transport for both long and short journeys. You might not own a car, or you don’t want to drive in congested areas. Having the kids in the car when you’re stuck in traffic isn’t fun. You can use buses and trains and in some places trams and underground trains too. The great thing is, kids usually go free up to a certain age. Children under five are often free, while those older (usually up to 16) are often half price. There are also offers you can use to save, such as a Family and Friends Railcard, which allows up to four adults and four children to travel together.

Reduce the Costs of Running Your Car

Having a car makes things a lot easier for many families. However, with the costs of tax, insurance, petrol, and maintenance, they can get expensive. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the cost of your car. One of the major expenses is insurance, and you can often find a better deal than the one you’re currently paying for. It’s a good idea to use a comparison tool, like the one on Money Expert’s website. You can look at different providers side by side and find the one that will work best for you. You could also reduce the cost of your car by taking good care of it, helping to reduce maintenance costs otherwise a visit to PMJ International may be required for certain spare parts.

Walk and Cycle More

Are you guilty of piling everyone into the car when you could walk or cycle somewhere instead? You might think it’s quicker to drive, but getting everyone in and out of the car could take a lot longer than walking to wherever you’re going. If it’s a short distance, a stroll could get you where you’re going in a few minutes. When it’s a bit longer, everyone could get their bike out. Little ones can go in bicycle seats or trailers attached to the back of adult bikes.

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Share Rides with Others

There are several opportunities you might have to share a car with friends, family or other parents. You don’t always need to take the whole family with you when you go somewhere, so taking your half-empty car can seem silly. Perhaps you’re taking one of the kids to a birthday party, and you can team up with a classmate’s parent. Sharing trips can be useful for the school run too, or perhaps you can carpool when you go to work. There’s no need to take the car all the time if it’s just you or you only have one passenger.

Condense Your Car Trips

Another thing that could be costing you more in petrol is taking lots of little car trips. Instead of popping to the shops for ten minutes every day, why not condense everything into one trip? You can often get away with only doing one shop every fortnight, perhaps with a top-up visit to more local shops in between. If you have something you need to do that doesn’t need to be done right away, you could wait until you have another errand to run. Then you can do both at the same time, instead of making two separate trips. You can also do things on the way to doing something else, like picking up the kids.

Skip the Shopping Trips

You can also try skipping the shopping trips altogether. Online shopping will get you just about anything these days, from milk to new clothes. Shopping with the kids isn’t much fun anyway, and it’s not always easy to find time to do it without them. You can often get free delivery when you shop online, and when you do have to pay, you can get it fairly cheap. For example, if you do your food shop online, it might only cost a pound to get it delivered during a quiet time.

You can save on your family’s transport costs with some clever tricks. It’s an important part of your budget, so seeing how you can cut the expenses is essential.

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Are You Your Worst Financial Enemy?

March 10th, 2017 Posted in Money Tips
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We all have big financial goals and milestones that we want to reach. The economy may be tough and your job may not be paying as much as you’d like, but often, our worst financial enemy is ourselves. If you want to reach those goals faster, you need to be critical about the way you’re spending. Here, I’ve listed some common wasteful habits that countless people need to drop.

Staying Loyal to Brand Names

With the sheer amount of advertising that we’re bombarded with, it can be easy to believe that brand name products will always give us more for our money, without counting the cost. This is especially true when it comes to clothes shopping, which is covered more in this Yahoo finance article. The next time you do your regular grocery shop, try substituting a few brand names for more generic, affordable products. Yes, the quality may not always be what you’re used to, but you’d be surprised at some of the hidden gems you’ll find.

Regularly Changing your Oil

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Okay, so staying on top of routine car maintenance is a good habit, and can save you a small fortune by avoiding hefty mechanic’s fees. However, if you’re changing the oil in a modern car for every 3,000 miles it clocks, you could be wasting a lot of money. This is because many of the latest cars to come out can run on synthetic oil, which can be good for 8,000 miles or more. Obviously, you should always do your research, and make sure that your car can run on longer-lasting oils and still perform well.

Drinking Bottled Spring Water

If you always make a point of getting your recommended water intake, then great! However, if you always buy bottled water from a store, rather than simply refilling a bottle with tap water, it could mean the difference between spending a few hundred pounds a year or a couple of quid. I’m pretty lucky in that my area’s tap water tastes crisp and clean. I for one can’t tell the difference between the bottles you find in a store’s fridge and the one that I fill up before I leave the house. However, even if your tap water has a twinge of chlorine to it, simply refrigerating it can make a huge difference.

Eating Out

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I’m not saying you can never set foot in a restaurant again. After a lot of hard work, treating yourself to an exquisite meal at a great restaurant is one luxury that you should really make time for. However, eating out should never be a regular habit. If you get used to eating in your favourite restaurants every few days, it can be very hard to break the habit, and it will keep haemorrhaging money. You may not be an expert chef, but cooking good food can be much easier than you’d expect. Furthermore, when you make this one change in your dining habits, the amount you’ll save will encourage you to spend more time in the kitchen, and less looking at menus!

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Don’t Apply For That Job Just Yet

March 7th, 2017 Posted in Jobs and Careers
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Hunting for a job is one of the testing and trying times of any person’s professional career. It takes persistence, concentration, and steadfast optimism, and that is because you are going to trawl through pages and pages on job sites and receive rejection and rejection. It takes serious courage and determination to keep your chin up.

But eventually you’ll find a job pop-up, and you’ll wonder how you didn’t find it before now. It is a company you’d absolutely love to work for. You seem to tick all the requirements they are looking for in a candidate. It is within the right salary range. Everything seems to be a great fit and you suddenly feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

However, before you jump the gun and send an application off without being ready, here are a few things you need to do first:

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Improve Your Online Profile

It is common knowledge that, when you apply for a job, the first thing the hiring manager and HR department is going to Google your name. They are going to look at your LinkedIn page, your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and why wouldn’t they? You would do the same thing. This isn’t to assess whether you drink occasionally, it is more to see if there is anything they should be wary of. It means looking at how up to date your profiles are and about how seriously you’ll take the role. It is about whether your personality will be a good fit.

Do Your Own Googling

Do not apply for a job without swatting up on everything there is to know about the company you are applying to. You’ve spend ages searching for a job, so you may as well spend ages making sure you know all you can about the job. It may be that you don’t need to exercise your newly gathered knowledge. However, it might be that you do, and you don’t want to seem unprepared. Pay special attention to the company’s career page so that you can see what they are looking for and what their ethos is. Look at their blog. Read any news articles you can find. Look at who is on the board. Check out the company’s journey. The more you can arm yourself with – the more you seem like you care – the better your chances of succeeding.

Do A Background Check On You

Any respectable and thorough employer will do a background check on you, so make sure there is nothing out there that could come back and sting you unexpectedly. A DBS check would be required which ensures unsuitable people are not employed, CRB direct make this process a lot smoother. If there is any niggling feeling at the back of your skull or a quiet whisper in your head that keeps asking do I really have a warrant out on me, then make sure you get it checked out so that you know for sure. You don’t want to find out during the interview process that there is a problem with your history, especially one you can’t explain.

Bespoke Your Application

A generic application is so obvious to anyone that has looked at more than 5 CVs. So make sure you tailor your entire application to the job role at hand. You don’t want to find your dream job, but miss out because of laziness. Yes, it is hard work tailoring each and every cover letter, and each and every CV, but it will be worth it in the end.

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Funeral Costs: Alternative Fundraising

March 7th, 2017 Posted in Uncategorized
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The loss of a loved one is never a good time, and it can be even more stressful if you have to try and find the finances to make sure that you give your loved one the funeral they deserve. There are many financial worries, but it can feel a bit of pressure to get the funds, and especially if you are wracked by grief. If you have any concerns about ever having to raise money for a funeral, there are some options available to you.

There are different ways we can raise money in the social media age, and although it may not sound like a sensitive option, you can start a Kickstarter or GoFundMe campaign if you are really desperate for the funds. It has been known to be an option for people who have nowhere else to turn, and because of the sensitive nature of the subject, people are willing to donate, which is a great relief. There are other options available to you that are considered an alternative route. It can be a stressful time, but depending on the cause of death, you may be entitled to a payout from the parties responsible, and there are firms like Krebs Law Firm Personal Injury Attorneys who can work with people to recover the funds they are owed after negligence or an accident. The funds that are paid out would be enough to cover the costs of the funeral. If there is no option to fund a funeral, the local council or the hospital may be able to arrange a funeral service. The stipulations of this are that the service tends to be a cremation, and the service date is chosen for you and is usually shorter than the average funeral service. These are, of course, downsides if you planned on having a specific type of send-off.

If you are in a partial financial position to pay for the funeral and there are funds in the estate of the deceased party, you could claim it from the estate afterward. However, you should check to see if the money can be reclaimed from the estate first because it might not be possible. Another option would be to access the funds from the deceased’s account. This needs to be done as legally as possible because it could be perceived as an act of fraud. It is a delicate matter because when a person dies, their account tends to be frozen unless it is a joint account. But it is possible to ask the bank to release funds if you have ID and a copy of the death certificate, but it is down to the discretion of the bank, and this may only be granted if there is no formal will in place.

Apart from the standard methods, there are some alternate ways of paying for a funeral, as outlined. The stress and heartache of a situation like losing a loved one can be made worse by going through things like probate and arranging the funeral, but there are some options available if worse comes to worse.

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