Tactical Strategy to Eliminate Debt

I carry two roles, one as a debt consultant and the other as a marketing and social media consultant and strategist. Yesterday I wrote a post on the difference between strategic and tactical social media marketing.

It occurred to me that the same strategic and tactical thought process can go into the debt elimination process. Americans are burdened with debt across all spectrums. You would think that there would would be one simple solution to getting rid of it. The truth is that there will be different tactics for each individual family.

Where to start? Start with a Strategic Plan:

A strategic plan answers the question where do you want to go?

Obviously the overarching goal is to get out of debt. To put a proper strategic plan into place one has to dig a little deeper and answer the following questions:

1. What kind of debt do you want to get out of: Credit Card Debt?, Medical Debt,? Business Debt? Mortgage Debt? Tax Debt? Gambling Debt?

2. How much of each kind of debt do you have?

3. Are you going to eliminate all of your debt or just certain types of debt (for instance credit card debt)

4. What is your time frame? 1year, 5 years, 10 years?

5. Are you in a financial hardship and struggling to pay your debt

Once you have the overarching questoins answered you can write out a strategy statement or plan. This might read as follows:

I want to pay off my X amount of credit card debt and my mortgage of X amount of dollars within x number of years. This will allow me to (retire, vacation, relax, ect) and live my life without stress.

Now that the stragegy statement is written, it's time to go determine the tactical plan. By definiation, "Strategic" answers the question - where do I want to go. Tactic answers the question how am I going to get there?

The tactical plan will differ for each person and will depend on the type of debt, amount of debt and whether there is a financial hardship or not. Hardship based solutions include:

Bankruptcy, Credit Counseling and Debt Settlement

Non-hardship based programs include:

mortgage acceleration, refinancing, debt consolidation loans, debt roll down or snowball.

In the days to come we'll be talking about each of the options and helping to educate you on the pros and cons of each tactic!