Cutting Debt in Half

Getting rid of 50% of your total debt might seem like an insurmountable task, especially if you are currently struggling with several payments, but there is a way to drastically reduce what you owe. In order to be successful, debt reduction has to be strategic and constant.


Take a look at the following tips for an example of how to cut your debt in half.


Organize Outstanding Balances

The first step must be to get an accurate picture of your debt situation. Often people who feel bogged down by debt have no idea exactly how much they owe because they have stopped looking at statements. They avoid keeping track of the numbers to stop feeling so overwhelmed. This is a big mistake, because if you don’t know how far in debt you are, it is impossible to devise a way out, whether it be on your own or with the help of a debt consolidation company.


Pull out all the statements with balances. This may include unpaid bills, overdrawn current accounts and credit card statements. Then make a list of all the balances starting with the amount with the highest interest and working your way down to those with no interest charges.


Take a Look at Your Budget

Now that you have itemized your debt, you need to go through your budget with a fine tooth comb. You will be looking for ways to reduce spending and divert the excess cash to debt payments.


If you don’t have a budget, now would be a good time to draft one. Simply write down your income on one side and on the other make a list of your expenses. Get your receipts from the last month together to help remember where the money was spent. You can now commit to curb all spending except absolute necessities.


Try Negotiating With Creditors

It couldn’t hurt to pick up the phone and call your creditors to try to negotiate better rates or lower minimum payments. Let them know that you are going through a difficult time but that you are committed to paying your loan or facility. You may be able to talk your way into a lower interest that can significantly hasten how fast you can deal with your debt.


Implement the Debt Snowball

You may have heard of the debt snowball before, but you might not know how to implement it to your own situation. It is actually a simple process.


Look at the list of your debt obligations that you prepared earlier. Try to find ways of transferring larger high interest balances to lower interest instruments. For instance, you may have a large balance on a high interest credit card and a smaller balance on a credit card with a low introductory rate. Transferring from the high to the low interest means you save immediately on the interest payments.


The next step is to allocate money to your different outstanding balances. This is where the snowballing comes in because your payment balances will start to come down like an avalanche. To do this, you keep paying the minimum payments on all credit cards and your bills. You apply the extra to the debt with the highest interest (on the top of the list) until it is paid off in full. Then you repeat the process month after month until you have brought your debt to a manageable level.


Cutting your debt in half is possible if you come up with a plan and stick to it until you achieve your goal.

Cavalry Portfolio Services

Cavalry Portfolio Services, LLC is one of the many debt collection agencies located throughout the U.S. While its head office is located in Hawthorne, New York, it also has three further regional offices in Arizona, Oklahoma and Minnesota. Their key focus is on the collection of delinquent debt.

Cavalry does not own any financial products themselves, but instead they work with other companies to help them collect outstanding debt. In some cases, Cavalry acts as a collecting service for the company and in others, it buys the debt that is owed. Often, they work with credit card companies, banks and phone companies, including MBNA and Sprint.

When a debt is purchased, it is done by Cavalry Investments, LLC. Cavalry Investments is headquartered in the Hawthorne, New York office. Cavalry Portfolio Services acts purely as a collections service for Calvary Investments. Both Calvary Investments and Cavalry Portfolio Services are privately held firms.

According to the Cavalry website, they put a keen focus on treating all customers with professionalism and respect. They emphasize the amount of training all of their employees receive, both when they start and throughout their career with Cavalry. The goal of the company is to keep all of their debt resolution specialists as up to date as possible when it comes to debt collection regulations in the state where they work. While their website is professionally done, it gives very little information about the actual company. The About Us provides nothing about the actual company, and instead talks about their commitment to excellent customer service.

Unfortunately, this message of customer satisfaction through excellent customer service does not mesh with the large number of blogs, articles and comments that can be found by doing a simple search on the company’s name. It is hard to discredit the vast amount of negative information out there with so little information given by the company itself. Complaints against the company range from rude and impolite employees to the company sending harassing and negative letters to people who have either paid off their debt or had no debt in the first place. There are also a number of blog posts about negative marks placed on credit reports by Cavalry.

According to the Better Business Bureau, none of the four offices listed with Cavalry have an accreditation. The ratings for the offices range from no rating to an A for the Arizona regional office. For all four offices, the number of complaints has been noted and the fact that the company has been sending fraudulent collection letters to consumers has been listed on two of the reports by the Better Business Bureau.

Overall, it is hard to discredit the wealth of negative information about this company, so if you are contacted by them, tread wearily.