It may sound almost too simplistic: but one of the most effective ways to avoid any future debt problems is to learn to manage your finances. Whether we like it or not, in this day and age that doesn’t mean sitting down at the kitchen table on Sunday night trying to balance our checkbook. What it does mean is taking full advantage of the system in place so that you pay all your bills on time.

Luckily, your debt management strategy does need to not be too complicated; provided, of course, that you manage it in a sensible way. To help you out, here are 5 easy to implement debt management tips:

Use Online Banking
Where possible, use online banking to pay your bills. We live in a computer age, so let technology help you out and do as much of your debt management online as possible. This not only allows you to avoid any nasty bank queues, but also lets you do your banking 24-hours a day, 7 days a week.

Provided you can pay your bills online, there really is no excuse these days for making a late payment (apart, of course, from the fact that you don’t have the money!).

Reduce the Number of Creditors
Keep it simple — have as few creditors as possible. With most people, a large part of their debt management problems arise because of the sheer number of creditors they have to pay. There’s the credit card company, the store cards, the utility bills, the car loan payment, the home loan payment, the student loan payment, and so on and so on.

If this sounds all too familiar to you, try to reduce your debt management problems by reducing the number of creditors you have. For example: if you currently have 2 credit cards, neither of which is used too much, why not just make it so that you only have 1. Better yet, pay off the credit cards you have altogether. Also, in need, consider consolidation your existing outstanding debt into one larger debt using the debt consolidation method.

Use automated payment
Almost all of your existing creditors would be overjoyed to hear that you’d like to pay them via an automated debit system. What’s more, doing things this way makes your debt management process much easier. So don’t keep your head stuck in the sand, arrange to pay your debts by automated payment.

Don’t have too many bank accounts
Nearly all of us have more bank accounts than we need. This not only causes us to have problems tracking where our money is, but also means that we have to pay fees on those accounts. Any effective debt management system relies on having as few bank accounts as possible.

Moreover, if you’re new to this debt management process, you really need to only have 2 types of accounts, a checking and a savings (unless you have accumulated lots of savings). Then all you need to do is to transfer your savings each month to your savings account.

Save as much as you can
You never know when it’s going to rain (financially speaking), so get in the habit of saving as much of your money as you can. At worst, you need to make sure you are saving at least ten per cent of your monthly salary. To help you do this, always give yourself 24-hours grace period before you decide to buy anything. If you still want to buy it, then go back to purchase the item. If it’s gone – you weren’t supposed to buy it in the first place.

By simply by following these tips hopefully you’ll soon be on top of your finances and won’t need to consider any debt management program in the future.