Few individuals would refute that using credit cards tends to make day to day life simpler, reducing the need to hold cash and making it effortless to buy online and by telephone.

But nevertheless, expending with plastic can be too easy, because it doesn’t always feel as if you’re actually parting with any cash. As a consequence the temptation is to spend without thinking about the implications too rigorously, until you hear the ominous thud of a substantial credit card bill striking the doormat.

If you were caught out in this way, the dimensions of your credit card debt may seem mind-boggling, but don’t panic – there are some simple measures it is easy to choose to adopt start getting your credit balances back in order.

Try and make a bit more than the minimum monthly payments:

The lowest payments required by credit card companies have gradually decreased over the years. Where once it was typical to have to repay a minimum of 5% of your balance every month, it’s now common to only have to pay 2.5% or 3%. With installments this small compared to your debt, a large chunk of each transaction gets swallowed up in interest charges. Depending on the APR rate of your card, up to 75% of each payment could be ‘lost’ in this way, meaning that it takes a very long time for your balance to reduce to any great extent.

By seeking to repay more than the minimum, even if only by a little, you can speed this process up, and in the long term you’ll end up paying much less in interest charges.

Prioritize your card debts:

When you’ve got more than one card account with different rates of interest, it makes sense to concentrate on the one with the highest interest charges. This means not just the one with the highest interest rate, but the one which actually charges you most each month, which could have a lower rate but a larger balance.

Check your statements to see which card is costing you most in interest every month, and try to consentrate on paying off this card first by putting any spare cash you have into extra payments while keeping to the minimums on your other cards.

Change your card:

The credit card market is very competitive, and rates have fallen over the last year or two. You could be stuck with an old card charging an old rate that is much higher than newer cards. If you get a new card with a lower rate and transfer your account balance on to it, you could save a lot in interest charges, allowing you to reduce your debt. If you can get a card with an introductory rate on balance transfers then all the better – you’ll get a few months of interest free credit which you can use to really decrease your balance as 100% of every repayment will be helping to clear your debt.

Debt consolidation:

If finding a less costly card isn’t an option or isn’t something you feel happy about, then maybe a debt consolidation loan would be worth looking at. If you take out a loan and use this money to pay off all your card debts, you could benefit from a lower rate as loans are normally quite a bit cheaper than credit cards.

The downside to these loans is that the repayment period might be quite long, and so even though your monthly repayments will with luck be lower, you’ll stay in debt for longer and so end up paying more in interest. Done carefully, however, consolidation can be a sound move if there’s little chance of clearing your debt in any other way.

Be careful about your spending!

All the above tactics for getting your debt at hand will only work if you stop getting deeper into debt – and this means stopping spending on your cards. Ideally, you’d slice them up so that you can’t use them again, but this might not be realistic as you may need to keep them as a credit option in an emergency. In any case, dropping your spending to an absolute minimum will keeping your repayments as high as possible is the only sure strategy to clearing your debt in the long term.