Most people look at the debt with the highest interest rate, see how much money has accumulated in their savings and take a guess at how much they can afford to send in and still keep a "just in case" cushion in their account. 

While this might result in an earlier payoff on one bill or another if they are lucky, it is more likely to cause other debts to actually take longer to complete. Most people don't realize that there would be a far better result available to them if they knew how to assess every characteristic of every bill in relation to every other bill's characteristics. 

We look at our bills as if they are all separate items sitting side by side but what's really happening is that they are all mathematically intertwined with each other where the collective generation of future interest over time is concerned.

You see, each one of these bills has a certain term length, a different payment due date, a certain minimum payment, an interest rate that may be variable and most importantly, a mathematical relationship to every other bill. In other words, to know which is the right bill to send how much extra to and when requires a complete understanding of the overall picture.

If you had only one bill it would be easy to know that this would be the only possibility to send extra to but you would still not be able to guess what the optimum extra amount would be and when to send it to get the most leverage for your dollar.

But what happens if you have multiple debts? 

For each additional debt you add in to the equation you increase the combination of possible outcomes. With just 5 debts there are 120 different ways to address them and only one way is the best way.

6 debts involve 720 possibilities. 7 debts would reach 5,040 and only one way is the best way. Is this something that you want to continue to guess at? Being wrong could cost you thousands.       

   If these locks were your debts how would you figure
the optimum combination to eliminate them the quickest?