Customer financing with Okinus lease-purchase programs is more than just a great way to get the products you need on terms you can manage. Outside convenient appliance financing, furniture financing, and even laptop financing, Okinus leasing offers an opportunity for rebuilding credit.
However, any time you use customer financing to improve your credit or quality of life, you run into challenges. For some people, their debt is an uncontrollable problem that never stops growing. It’s all too easy to forget an upcoming payment, overspend, or miss a due date. Only 30% of all Americans have a long-term financial plan involving savings and investment goals — for the rest, finances, in general, are often a subject of overwhelm.
But debt and customer financing don’t have to be scary. As long as you approach it with the right mindset and systems in place, using lease to own finance options to fix your credit and furnish your home can be easy and fun.
To learn how to manage your debt without letting it overwhelm you, keep reading.
Know Who You Owe and How Much
If you aren’t aware of a situation, you can’t know if there’s a problem or not. And believe it or not, most people are not aware of their own finances, especially where debt is involved.
The first thing you should do when you’re ready to tackle your personal finances is to make a list of all your debts. This list should include the names of all your creditors, the amount of money you owe to each, the monthly payment amount, the monthly due date, and the date when the debt will be all paid off.
To make sure your information is correct, you can check your credit report to make sure you haven’t missed any debts on your list. This might also be a good time to dispute any errors you find on your credit report.
Simply being aware of your debts will help you be proactive about managing your money and paying your debt off. You should refer to this list at least once each month when you check your budget or pay your bills. Be sure and update it every few months as the amounts change over time.
Set Up Automatic Payments
Using automatic payments isn’t only recommended for debt management. It’s a good rule to live by for all the payments you have.
Forgetting payments isn’t just inconvenient and embarrassing. Just one missed payment can wreak havoc on your credit score (which defeats the purpose of using debt to fix your credit). If you don’t realize you’re missing payments and accidentally go a few months without paying, you could end up with debt collectors on your doorstep with a very hefty fine.
Let’s face it: life is complicated. There’s enough to think about without trying to remember a dozen individual payments each month. So why not automate them?
If you can’t be sure there will be money in the bank when the payments are due, you should also set automatic reminders on your phone’s or computer’s calendar. This way you’ll know when payments are coming out of your account and how much needs to be there, without trying to remember it on time.
This is a good lesson to apply to all of life: we’re surrounded by incredible tools that weren’t available 20, or even 10, years ago. From virtual assistants to digital automation, these services were developed to help make our lives easier, yet most of us never take advantage of them.
If you have a virtual assistant built into your phone, why not use it when you need a question answered? Since we have calendars and reminder apps on all of our devices, why not let them help us keep our lives organized?
Pay More Than the Minimum
To rebuild your credit and stay on customer financing’s good side, it’s imperative that you make payments on time. If all you can afford are the minimum payments, then do that. But if it’s remotely possible for you, you should strive to pay more than the minimum amount.
This applies mostly to credit cards, but only paying the minimums each month could keep you in debt for years to come. To keep your debt under control, try to pay a little more than you have to each month.
