Discover a more efficient way to pay down your debt. By Darrell Delamaide

You made a resolution to get out of debt, or to reduce your debt, because times, and jobs, are uncertain. You have a number of credit cards, a car payment and a home equity loan out there you haven’t used in a while. You’d like to get rid of all of this debt or most of it.

Where do you start? How do you do it? It seems daunting, but fortunately personal finance experts have given this some thought and devised some strategies.

First thing, obviously, is avoid taking on new debt as much as possible. Use a debit card for purchases instead of a credit card, so you’re only spending money you have. (Be careful, though, to avoid some of the risks in using a debit card, such as over-drafting your account or greater liability if you lose the card.)

Second, itemize your debt. What is the balance on each? The interest rate? The minimum payment? (You don’t need to include the primary mortgage on your home in this list unless you would like to.)

Total up your minimum payments that have to be made each month. Then figure out how much more you have available to pay on the debt. The core strategy in paying off debt is to focus on one account at a time and apply all the money you have beyond the minimum payment obligations to that one debt.

Logic, and math, will dictate that you focus on the debt with the highest interest rate first. The sooner you get that paid off, the less interest you’ll pay and the more money you’ll have to pay off your other debts. With mathematical certainty, this is the quickest way.

Highly motivated people should probably proceed in this manner.

But financial guru Dave Ramsey recommends making a concession to human nature. People aren’t always rational and, sometimes, their motivation wanes. Paying down debt, like breaking a bad habit or losing weight, needs some positive reinforcement along the way.

So Ramsey recommends the “snowball” method of paying down debt. In this method, you pick your smallest debt to pay down first. You make the minimum payments on all your other accounts, and apply all extra funds available to that one debt.

Because it’s the smallest debt, you will be able to pay that off more quickly than any of the others. Then you can apply the minimum payment you were making on that debt, plus all the extra available funds, to the next-smallest debt, and pay that down. By the time you get to the third debt, you have the minimum payments from the first two, plus your extra monthly amount to apply to it. These larger monthly payments will whittle away that debt even faster, the way a snowball gets bigger as it rolls down a hill.

The positive reinforcement of seeing these debts disappear one after the other is worth more, Ramsey reckons, than tackling a higher-interest debt that might be so extensive it doesn’t seem like your monthly payments are even making a dent in it.

If you have two debts that are more or less equal in amount, you should of course tackle the one with the higher interest rate first, but keep generally to the strategy of working your way from the smallest debt to the largest.

One way to make that “snowball” grow even faster is to add the “snowflake” method to your strategy. In this method, you pull out all the stops and do everything you can to increase the amount you can pay toward your debt each month—sell things on eBay, have a yard sale, never pass up an opportunity to earn some extra money, limit your Starbucks visits to once a week, etc. Take all this extra cash, these “snowflakes,” no matter how small, and apply it your current priority debt. Even make interim payments, if you can, to reduce the principal as quickly as possible. An extra $100 or $200 a month can quickly make a visible difference in your outstanding balance.

Then there’s the question of whether you should augment your debt payments by cutting back on payments to your retirement plan. Financial advisers are split. Some say you should never cut back payments on your retirement plan because compounding tax-free is so advantageous. Others argue that accelerating your debt payments to reduce those high interest charges might justify suspending retirement payments for a while—though only for two years at most.

A middle path if you are paying the maximum allowed into your retirement plan is to cut it back to the level that your employer is willing to match, so you continue to benefit from those matching funds.

Ultimately, you have to set your own priorities, depending how big your debts are and how long you have to save for retirement.