Deal with Your Debt: The Right Way to Manage Your Bills and Pay Off What You Owe

by Liz Pulliam Weston

Most people carry debt for most of their adult lives. Yet, most books on debt focus mainly on how to pay it all off, and live forever without it. Too often, following that advice leads only to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0131856758
• ISBN13: 9780131856752
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: FT Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

How much should I borrow on my student loan? The correct answer is NONE!

Why do colleges cost so much? Large capital spending provide the best facilities, faculty, and sport centers and teams to keep wealth alumni donors happy. Universities hope to boost their national ranking by spending on high-speed internet access, new gyms, concert halls, and better student housing. Faculty salaries are expensive. The median salary for a tenure professor is $76,200. Many colleges are trying to shrink class sizes and reduce class loads so professors can do more research and bring glory to the University. What type of loans are available? A Perkins loan offers a 5% fixed interest rate and a maximum borrowed amount of $20,000. Stanford loan is a variable rate loan capped at 8.25% and a 4% upfront fee. How much should you borrow? None is the correct answer. If you don't have money then don't go to college. Save your money then go to college. If you yield to temptation and accept a loan then your loan payments once you graduate shouldn't exceed 10% of your expected monthly gross. You will have 10 years to repay the student loan. If you earn $40,000 then your payback will be 4,000 a year (10%) or about 340 dollars a month for a $26,000 dollar loan. The average undergraduate loan is about 26k. 50 percent of the student enrolled in college do not graduate and leave the college with heavy student debt. If you graduate making less than 40k the loan repayment amount will be overextended in ratio to earnings. Instead of 10 percent of your wages the loan will represent 15 to 20 percent. The heavier debt loan increases the risk of default.

dealing with your debt rating

This book is very informative. It gives a lot of useful tips as to how to manage your finances and how to actually deal with your debts. I would recommend this book to anyone who is trying to figure out ways to managing their debts.

great information - but use with caution

This book is full of great information on high to prioritize your financial life in terms of debt reduction, retirement saving and other saving. But the advice assumes the reader has a fair amount of discipline (i.e., ability to budget and constrain extraneous spending). The book goes into great detail on how to balance debt reduction with maintaining financial flexibility, maintaining good FICO scores, etc. But far too many people who are deeply in debt (and seeking help from books like this) have a spending habit that needs more drastic surgery than this book gives. So, I would say this book gives outstanding advice, but only for a subset of the public who have the right discipline. For many folks, the more drastic "surgery" advocated by cheerleaders like Dave Ramsey will be more effective.

Thorough unbaised advice

I have known Liz Weston for years as a journalist and have always found her to be very thorough and no-nonsense. This book is no exception. It's well researched with unbaised and sensible strategies for dealing with debt. I had the opportunity to interview Liz on my internet radio show EverydayWealthRadio recently about the book and she clearly has great advice on this topic. She addresses things like 401k loan, pros and cons of different types of debt, and the common questions I hear from consumers,