'Tis the season for credit card debt, but don't fear: We've got you covered with a list of some of the top digital tools to help you dig yourself out of that financial holiday hole.
The average consumer is expected to spend more than $800 on gifts for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, according to the National Retail Federation. That doesn't include the wallet-walloping impact of all those family gatherings and festive home decor.
But lucky for you, the digital revolution delivers with some credit-control solutions, my favorite of which is the website MyFico.com.
If you're not a subscriber to MyFico, you're missing out. For the past 10 years or so, I've benefited from its monthly credit tracking service and credit score simulator tools.
For $19.95 a month, MyFico will monitor your credit score and advise you how to repair your credit. You'll see a list of the factors impacting your credit score, gain the ability to calculate the best way to pay off your balances and how long that will take.
MyFico also rates the best credit cards and lists balance-transfer deals available to you, which leads me to my next tip.
For whatever reason, balance transfers are almost entirely found and initiated online. For instance, the "Discover it" card is now offering 0% APR on balance transfers for 18 months, with a 3 percent fee applied to the transferred amount. If it's going to take you months to pay off your holiday debt, you should look into an online balance transfer and calculate whether that 3 percent fee is less than the cost of the current APR on the credit card you've charged up.
Now, let's say you decided to be Mr. or Mrs. Claus and are really staring down a barrel of serious financial problems. Your APRs could be so high at this point that it actually makes sense to take out a loan. I know that sounds crazy — going into debt to pay off debt.
But there's an intriguing service founded by some Google alums that may be worth your consideration. Upstart.com is a peer-to-peer lender that is targeting highly educated people with a good work history and debt — i.e., student loan debt. With APRs starting at 5.7 percent, upstart.com appears to provide an elegant solution in the face of a greedy Wall Street that doesn't much care that we're churning out a generation of Americans that will never be able to buy a house.
The last solution I'm going to suggest is like a digital financial consultant at your fingertips: Mint. Go to mint.com and input information about your credit cards and bank accounts and voila — you'll have your entire financial outlook in real time, for better or worse. Ironically, this tool may help you decide that it's time to forgo some of these 21st-century tools for something a little more time-tested: a pair of good ol' fashioned scissors.
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