Starting a business isn’t always cheap and it is too easy these days to rack up a sizeable debt while doing so on credit cards and personal loans.

One popular way of getting out of debt is consolidating all your cards loans into a (hopefully) cheaper loan and then making a monthly payment - but often those cards which were supposed to be consolidated aren’t cancelled and you just end up with a bigger debt. Or else, you may not be able to get another loan to do the consolidating.

Don’t fret, you can repay that debt if you have a strategy. A popular one is to pay off the one with the highest interest - this makes sense but if the one with the highest interest also has the largest balance it will take some time (time which increases the temptation to use what you’ve paid off).

I’m a big fan of the snowball method. Basically, you choose the card with the smallest balance, make extra payments so that this is paid off, cancel it, then use the payments you were making on that card to your next lowest balance card until that’s cancelled, now you use the payments you were making on both cards to the next card in the queue and so on until they are all paid off. You might struggle a little with the first card but after that all you are doing is making the same minimum payments you are making now - just in a much smarter way.

To help you clear that debt, Vertex (an Excel resource site) has provided a free Excel spreadsheet where you enter your debt details, choose your total monthly payment and gives you a summary of what you have to pay depending on the strategy (high interest or snowball) you’ve chosen. It will then (on a second worksheet) give you a payment schedule which you can print off.

The Free Debt Reduction Calculator (thanks to The Consumerist)