Financial Preparedness -- How to Get Out of Debt By Stephanie Dayle - Mon Sep 24, 8:00 am Getting Out of Debt IS prepping. It is, and it's an important part of prepping that people love to ignore.  Rather than explain this point again I will refer you to my past articles on this subject so we can move on to how a person or family can go about attacking their debt. In financial guru Dave Ramsey 's popular Financial Peace program, he also uses the time proven method of paying off debt called a "Debt Snowball."  If you are not familiar with that term, what it entails is taking your lowest owed balance and focusing all of your money efforts on that bill first paying it off as quickly as possible.  Then taking the exact amount you were paying on that bill plus the minimum payment of the next bill and paying that one off as quickly as possible -- repeat with the next lowest balance and then the next, until you are out of debt.  The amount you can pay on your bills grows as you pay each one off, in a sense you are snowballing the payments, by the time you reach your bigger bills, the amount you can pay on them will be much bigger than if you were just paying a little extra each month.  I was once in a position where I thought paying off our debt was impossible because we were so strapped