As I am dealing with the self-made burden of slowly demolishing the credit card bill monolith, I’m always looking for painless ways to pay down the balance a little bit more quickly and painlessly.  One method that I have found to be particularly painless is simply adding a couple of dollars to the payment.

This was a bit burdensome at first, because I kind of enjoyed going through my past payments and seeing them all as rounded numbers, such as payments of $60 or $100.  However, I realized that when I added just a couple of dollars to each payment, that extra amount compounds over time, AND I don’t really miss the extra money.

For example, instead of simply paying $100, if I pay, say, $105, than over the course of a year, I will have paid off $60 more bucks than I would have paid off otherwise, and the extra amount is not large enough top throw the rest of my budget out of whack.

I think that the trick with anything that is difficult is to find some way to make yourself believe that it is simple.  I believe that this trick manages that.  At the very least, it is slowly helping me out from under the pile of debt.