Step 1: Protect your essentials before any debt
Housing, utilities, food, transport to work and medication come first — before credit cards, before loans. A plan that skips this step collapses the first time real life happens. Write your essential costs down and subtract them from your take-home pay. What remains is the most you can safely point at debt.
Step 2: List what you owe, once, without judgement
- Who you owe
- Rough balance
- Interest rate, if you know it
- Minimum payment
Estimates are fine. You're building a map, not sitting an exam. If you can only manage three of the four columns today, that's still a plan.
Step 3: Cover every minimum, then pick one target
Paying minimums on everything stops fees and defaults from undoing your progress. Then choose onedebt to receive anything extra — either the highest interest rate (cheapest overall) or the smallest balance (fastest visible win). Both orders work; the best one is the one you'll keep following.
Step 4: Make the plan survive a bad month
Decide now what happens when money is short: which payments are untouchable (essentials and minimums) and what pauses first. A plan with a built-in bad-month rule doesn't get abandoned — it just gets slower for a while, and that's fine.
One step for this week
Write your list of debts and circle the one that gets any extra money first. That circled debt is the beginning of your plan. Money Reset can keep this list and order in front of you with the numbers you enter, so you don't have to rebuild it from memory each month.