You may need to examine your spending for last several months. Find things you can eliminate or do without for a while. Postpone purchases, cancel subscriptions. Anything to free up more money to pay off your debts.

You may even want to postpone investing for awhile. Are your investments beating that 18% you are paying on your credit card? If not, a better investment would be to repay your debts.

Once you have your monthly debt repayment amount set, you need to write down each monthly debt you are paying. Record creditor's name, current balance, and interest rate. Then take a separate sheet of paper and reorder debts so that debt with highest interest rate is at top.

Now as each monthly bill comes in pay minimum payment. Subtract minimum payment amount from your set monthly total. After all bills are paid for month, take any extra money left over and make another payment on debt at top of your list.

You can make an additional payment this month or save money to add to next month's bill. But don't spend it!

As each debt is repaid, cross it off your list, but keep paying total monthly amount you set at beginning. This will accelerate your debt repayment and save you hundreds or even thousands in interest charges.

The two keys to your ultimate debt elimination plan are to 1) stop getting further into debt and 2) set your monthly debt repayment amount. The rest is easy. You will be debt free before you know it!

************************************************************ © Simple Joe, Inc. David Berky is president of Simple Joe, Inc. which sells Simple Joe's Debt Eraser PC software. Debt Eraser can help anyone get out of debt quickly and inexpensively by creating a Rapid Debt Reduction Plan. This article may be freely distributed as long as copyright, author's information and an active link (where possible) are included.

I politely told her that I was not interested in raising my interest rate or borrowing more money, "but thanks anyway."

I then wondered how many other people would jump at opportunity to pocket a quick $10,000 at "low" rate of 15.9%.

I was also amused that she encouraged me to pay off my high interest debt with this money. Well, to my standards 15.9% is high interest debt. Granted it's not 24-25% charged by department stores but still it was more than I was currently being charged on any of my other cards.

Shouldn't an offer that would appeal to me be one that offered me money at a lower rate? Her offer seemed backwards. She was trying to entice me with vision of "extra cash" in my hand to do whatever I would like.

I took a moment to do some financial math (the most important kind) on this offer and found that if I had a current balance on that credit card of $4000 at my current interest rate of 12.9%, I would be paying about $43 a month in interest charges.

If I had accepted her offer for an additional $9000 at 15.9% (and I suspect that my regular rate of 12.9% would have risen to 15.9% rate also), I would be paying about $172 a month, exactly 4 times what I am currently paying. If I made a payment of $200 a month to pay off this debt, I would be paying for over 12 and a half years.

What I learned from this experience is that I should get into credit card business. Maybe I'll check on some bank and financial institution stocks today. With offers like this they must be making money.

Once again, those who understand interest earn it, those who don't, pay it.