Regardless of how you slice and dice things, paying off consumer debt takes a huge amount of discipline. It’s usually far harder — and far less fun — to get our of debt than it is to get into debt. (This isn’t true in all cases, of course; not everyone gets into debt because of reckless shopping. Some times bad things happen.)

To get rid of large (five- or six-figure) consumer debt in any reasonable time takes sacrifice to make those extra payments. Extra payments will speed the debt reduction process along, regardless of where the payments are made, because extra payments mean less interest gets charged to those accounts.

But, the $64,000 question is: Which debt should be paid off first? (If the debts are large enough, it could be a $64,000 question!)

There are pros to slaying a dragon quickly by paying off the lowest balance first.  But there are also pros to taking the longer road, which is to pay off the highest interest rate first. Taking this route means (possibly) that getting rid of the first debt will take longer (if the highest-rate debt is not also the one with the smallest balance) but it means that the interest savings will be the highest.  Paying down an 18% debt over paying down a 9% debt results in twice the accumulated interest savings.  It gets everything to zero with the least financial pain.

But again, in the grand scheme, it doesn’t matter which debt gets paid off first.  The important thing is that they all get paid off eventually.

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