I'm lucky that I have good credit. For which I really owe a debt of gratitude to my mother and father, who not only guided me financially through my first credit card transaction, but also helped pay for my college tuition and generally kept me on the right path monetarily. So while I've never earned a particularly large amount of money, I've never accrued a particularly large amount of debt, either. And what debt I've had I've been able to pay down quickly and, if not easily, then manageably.
Others aren't so lucky. My girlfriend, for example, comes from a family that is much more well to do than mine. And their attitude toward money infused her with a bit of recklessness when it comes to our finances. To that end, when we got together eight years ago, she was carrying seventy thousand dollars worth of student loan debt and fourteen thousand dollars worth of credit card debt. Which was daunting, since combined we were making less than sixty thousand dollars a year while living in New York City, the most expensive city in the world.
As soon as we decided to combine our finances, we came up with a plan to pay off her debt, and it resolved around finding a cheap credit card nearly every month to shift account balances. I would use my good credit to get zero percent interest on balance transfer offers, then switch a large chunk of her debt to that card, and then start paying the debt down without accruing any extra interest. The key, though, was finding that cheap credit card which would approve transfering large sums.
It was much easier to find a cheap credit card back in the early and middle part of last decade, when we were doing our financial gymnastics, than it is now. The aughties were the decade of easy credit, and my girlfriend and I were able to exploit that.
When she was carrying her fourteen thousand dollars of credit card debt, she was paying an interest rate of twenty two percent because her credit was so bad. I was able to get approved for two credit cards that offered zero percent interest on balance transfers for two years - one with a ten thousand dollar credit limit, the other with a five thousand dollar limit. By transferring her balance first to cheap credit card a then to cheap credit card b, I was able to wipe out interest payments for 24 months. In that time we paid off four thousand dollars, bringing her total down to ten thousand dollars worth of credit card debt.
Since then we've been repeating the same process, even as it becomes harder to find credit cards that will give a zero percent interest rate on balance transfers. But it's worked for us, at least, and this year we finally broke the thousand dollar barrier. We're down to triple digits for the first time since we've been together.