Debt Tracking: Taking Over Control of Your Debts Easily

Over the past few years, tracking my debts has become important to me. I have been on both sides of the credit spectrum and am five years post bankruptcy. Tracking your debts is a tool that you can use in order to complete several goals. One goal is knowing how much 'credit' debt you are in, another goal is avoiding bankruptcy by overspending, and yet another goal is seeing where your money is going in order to see how you may change your budgeting.

The very first thing you need to do is collect all of your monthly statements, the next step is to obtain a copy of your credit report from each of the thee big credit reporting agencies:Experian, Equifax and Transunion. Once you have these items you will be able to input the data that is needed to track your debt. I have had periods when I have increased my credit score by as much as 70 points simply be maintaining the credit card limits below 30%. I tracked my credit report through a credit monitoring agency, this isn't necessary but I wanted a cheaper way to see how my score was improving rather than buying FICO scores. While the numbers never matched from the monitoring agency to FICO, once I got things coded correctly and kept a close eye on the reports, the scores in general where within 20 points of one another.

Step One:
Decide if you want to track these with pen and paper or with a piece of software. I personally like Microsoft Excel and that is what I use to track my debt. (For purposes of this content, I will speak of Excel).

Step Two:
You will need to know:
Credit Limit on credit cards
Current balance of cards

For loans:
Original Loan amount
Current balance on loans

I also have a column for my APR% and I update that also (this alerts me to changes)

You will need to have several columns to track the desired information in order to track your debts.
Columns needed:
1. Creditor
2. APR%
3. Current Balance
4. Credit limit/Original loan amount
5. 50% of limit
6. 30% of limit
7. % to pay to 50% (this is the amount needed to payoff in order to get to 50% of your limit
8. % to pay to 30%