if only clearing debt was that easy however there is another approach you can do and actually makes a little more financial sense and that is to consider which of your debts is the most expensive you might be saying what do you mean by the most expensive? well the reality is and if you don't mind, i'll just top this one back up to help us as we go along the reality is with a lot of debts, there's a little bit being added each month by the banks but not for all debts particularly, say this is a credit card with your credit card you are going to be having a little bit of interest added every single month a bit, maybe a lot depending on the interest rate you are paying however maybe you've got a chunky bank loan or something like that and you took it out for a kitchen and you're paying it back, the chances are all the interest was added previously so as long as you maintain your contractual repayments, which is what you are supposed to be paying. the bank is not going to come along and add any more to that so actually you could say from now on that's quite a cheap debt paying that off quicker is going to be no real financial advantage to you whereas this one, every month the bank comes along and adds a little more in and actually the debt doesn't go down as quickly as possible we've already said that is important to maintain contractual repayments but you know what with some credit cards, the contractual repayments are so low that if all you did was pay your contractual repayment you literally could be paying it for years and years and years paying thousands of pounds worth of interest because the repayment is so low so it makes sense to identify which one is costing you the most each month and then once you have done that you then take whatever extra income you might have to get your debts cleared and you use it to start clearing that debt off quicker over time that will take you less time overall to get your debts cleared and your debts down please maintain all of your payments you're supposed to make on all of your debts but when you've got a bit left over, go for the most expensive one first if you want to go for the smallest one first, that's fine, sometimes the sense of achievement is just worth it but our overall advice would be, go for the one that is costing you the most money each month reduce that down as quickly as you possibly can whilst continuing to pay all your other debts off the important thing is that you are doing everything you can to reduce your debts as quickly as possible now there's obviously one way that i haven't mentioned yet around getting debts sorted and getting debts reduced that has become popular in the last decade or so and that is consolidation loans the whole idea of consolidation loans is instead of having lots of small separarte debts you find some way of bringing them all together and consolidating them all in one place and there's a few warnings that need to go with that and that is that is you consolidated all your debts in one place sometimes the interest rates that you end up paying as a result of consolidating is a lot more than if you had left them as individual debts and also and perhaps even bigger warning is that sometimes you might actually have to secure this debt against your property if you own a house we would always caution very strongly before you take anything that is currently an unsecured debt like a credit card and turn it into a much bigger debt that is secured against your property and so consolidation loans, we're not saying they're a complete no no but you've really got be very careful before going down that particular route one of my main motivations for going on the cap money course was to be able to put some kind of plan together to pay down the debt that i had built up as a law student it's quite a hefty amount and actually over the period of time the bank were asking me to repay it was about 8 years or so and actually, working with cap money we've actually managed to reduce that, through living by cash and budgeting we've managed ot reduce that to around about 15 months and it has just been really fantastic