10 Easy Ways You Can Pay Off Credit Card Debt

Debt is not something you want to have. You hear it your entire life, and yet so many people still have it. Sure, some people are just unwise when it comes to their finances, living above their means for various reasons. Others are put in a situation in which they feel they have no choice; jobs are lost and bills have to get paid somehow. At the end of the day, however, no one really cares how you amassed your impressive debt; all that matters is how you plan on paying it off. Because we know you want to pay it off.

The problem is that it’s not always easy to just send more money or tweak the budget (you’ve probably already cut out fancy coffee and date nights and name brand food). So what are you to do? Well, you have to get creative. Sometimes creativity means doing things you never thought possible in an effort to pay off your debts, and it is actually a lot easier than you might assume it is. We have a few creative methods you could use to pay off your debts if you’re willing to try a few.

Negotiate your bills

You can call companies and ask for your bills to be lowered. It might or might not work for many, but chances are good that it definitely will not happen if you do not ask. Try it; it might work. Call and tell the credit card company you have to close the account because you found a lower rate elsewhere. Watch them work their magic and lower yours. Do the same to your cell phone company and your cable company.

Rent your parking space

If you live somewhere that you can call quite busy, you might be able to make some money. Say you live close to an office complex downtown or you have a driveway in a busy neighborhood in which parking is a nightmare for those who have to park on the street. Offer up your driveway for a small fee per day, week or month and watch the money add up.

Run errands for others

You have to go to the supermarket, right? Why not ask a few of your elderly neighbors, new moms you know or anyone, really, if they’d like to pay you a small fee to go get their groceries, too. It’s like a home delivery service. They pay for their own groceries, but you pick them up and deliver them so that it takes that kind of hassle out of their day. I’d pay someone to do that for me in a heartbeat.

Rent your extra room

Have a mother-in-law suite at home? A pool house, maybe? An above the garage apartment that needs something useful to do? How about renting it out to make some money so that you can pay off some debt? You get to perform a background check and credit check on any potential renters, so you get to choose who is in your home so that you feel safe and secure and comfortable.

Rent the house

Are you going on vacation or on a business trip soon (because if you want to pay off debt, perhaps you should not be on a vacation)? If so, don’t just let your house sit there. Rent it out for a fee on Airbnb.com or something similar to that. You could make some serious cash doing this, and it works nicely since you’re not there to begin with. This is especially profitable if you live somewhere amazing, like the beach, the mountains or in a huge tourist destination.

Get new bank accounts

If you have some money to put into a new account, do it. You can find promotions being offered by banks all over the country that will pay you to open a new account. It’s so easy, too, since so many banks do this. The easy part is that most only want you to open an account and then have your direct deposits put into the account for something like two or three months, and then they will give you a couple hundred dollars as a bonus.

Get cash back credit cards

If you have a credit card and it does not offer cash back, get a new one. You need a good cash back card, because you can put everything on that card and pay it off every month (we are talking your basic expenses so that you can use the cash you’d use to pay them in the first place to pay the card off in full each month rather than accumulating even more debt). This means that if you have $5000 a month in expenses and you’re earning 1% cash back on those, you’re earning $50 per month, or $600 per year. That goes a long way to paying of credit card debt.

Get a new credit card

Additionally, many new credit card companies are offering their customers a chance to earn some serious cash, hundreds of dollars, for doing nothing but making a few thousand dollars worth of purchases in the first two or three months of opening the card. Sure, it sounds like more debt; but you have to be smart about it. Pay your mortgage, your insurance, your gas and groceries, your utilities; then take the cash you usually use to pay those things and pay off the card in full. You didn’t spend any money you were not already spending, but you just earned free cash.

Download Mobee

This is an app that allows you to go undercover and shop in local stores, evaluate them and then pays you. Download it, use it and let yourself earn a few extra bucks doing it. It’s not going to hurt, especially if you are already going to these places to begin with.

Sell your stuff

You can sell most anything on the internet, so do it. Sign up for local sales sites online, create an online garage sale, look up cash for cars, and do whatever it takes to sell your unwanted stuff. Many people will even buy things that they don’t need, just because people are sometimes quite strange. Profit off their strangeness; it’s fine.

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