Debt Diet Program

The Debt Diet program was popularized by Oprah Winfrey when it was featured during a multi-episode series that began airing on February 17, 2006. For this program, Oprah enlisted three financial specialists, Jean Chatzky, Glinda Bridgforth, and David Bach, to develop a plan by which personal debt could be eliminated. The Debt Diet programs consists of 2 phases broken down into 4 steps each.

Step 1 of the Debt Diet program is to find out how much debt you actually have. This means looking at all your credit cards and other loans and adding them up. The Debt Diet portion of Oprah’s website provides a handy chart to help you out. Step 2 is to track your spending. Find the little luxuries that you spend money on that add up and put that money to better use, namely paying off your debt. You’d be surprised how much you can put aside by maybe giving up fast food or buying cheaper generic products.

This brings us to step 3 of the Debt Diet Program what Oprah calls the “Credit Card Game.” This is simply learning some tricks of the credit card trade such as making higher payments, contacting your creditors and requesting lower interest rates, and learning which cards to pay down first. Step 4 is simple: stop spending. It can be tempting to use our credit cards so we’re advised to not even carry them with us and to instead use checks, cash, and debit cards to pay for things.

Step 5 of the Debt Diet program is to create a monthly spending plan. This is basically making a budget, but the Oprah website has charts and worksheets to help you on this difficult path. Step 6 of Debt Diet is to take big steps to grow your income. This step is mostly advised for those who still don’t have success after following the first 5 steps, but can be utilized by individuals who would like to speed up the process as well. These ideas are pretty extreme though and include moving and giving up your car.

Moving on to step 7 of the Debt Diet program, we’re advised to prioritize our debts and raise our credit score. The advice here is basically common sense. Prioritize secured debts first, debts that can cause wages to be garnished, services such as doctor bills, and then finally unsecured debts such as credit cards. Finally, any outstanding debt to friends and family should be repaid, always good advice.

Finally, step 8, the last step of the Debt Diet program is understanding our spending issues. This is simply examining ourselves to better understand our spending habits. Often we spend more when we are with others who are spending money as a form of social interaction. Spending also is a great way to make ourselves feel better if we’ve had a bad day or maybe just feeling down.

The Debt Diet program has been extremely successful by helping many people get and out debt and stay out of debt.