When you have too much debt, it takes over your world. You lose sleep stressing, start screening your calls to avoid collectors, and stop focusing at work because you're worried about money. Your relationships suffer, your health suffers and if you don't do something, you could find yourself back at Square One when it comes to your financial outlook.
So you need to get out of debt. Fast.
But what you don't want to do is destroy your credit in the process - or even worse, choose the wrong solution and make your issues even worse. So you need to plan your moves carefully so you make the right choices.
Making sure you can maintain control of your money.
When you're struggling to make ends meet because of debt, you need to find a solution that allows you to get back on track as quickly as possible. Of course, if your payments are too big and interest is making it impossible to make a dent in what you owe with a simple budgeting strategy, then it's going to take more aggressive action to get ahead.
What you don't want to do is make your situation worse - and if you're not careful, that's exactly what you can do. You can also hurt your financial future by taking steps that help you now, but hurt you in the future. It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So while you want to do everything possible to get ahead of debt, you don't want to take any actions that are going to do more harm than good in your financial outlook.