Get Out of Debt
Most payoff advice fails at the same point: it assumes a plan survives contact with a bad month.
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The method matters less than whether it still works when the car needs a repair, and that is the lens these guides are written through.
Here you will find the payoff orderings with their arithmetic set out — what avalanche saves in interest against what snowball buys in momentum — plus how to sequence debts that behave differently from a credit card. Secured debt, tax debt, medical bills and student loans each have their own leverage and their own consequences for missing a payment, and treating them as one pile is the most common structural mistake.
Before any ordering, two things do more work than the ordering does. The first is knowing the actual rate and balance on every account, written down in one place; a surprising number of plans are built on remembered numbers that are wrong. The second is deciding in advance what happens when income drops, because that decision made calmly is worth more than the two or three percentage points that separate one payoff order from another.
Nothing in this section is a product recommendation and nothing here is paid placement. Where a guide gives a figure, it is sourced; where the honest answer is that it depends on facts I do not have about you, the guide says that rather than inventing a number.
