Debt Snowball Method

The snowball method orders your debts by balance, smallest first. You pay minimums across the board and put everything extra toward the smallest balance until it disappears, then add that freed-up payment to the next smallest — a payment that snowballs larger with each account closed.

It deliberately ignores interest rates, which means it costs more than the avalanche method in pure dollars. That is the acknowledged trade.

What it buys is motivation. Clearing a whole account early is a concrete, visible result, and behavioral research on debt repayment has consistently found that people who eliminate small balances first are more likely to stick with a plan through to the end. A plan abandoned in month four saves nothing at all.

The two approaches are not exclusive. If one debt carries a punishing rate, pay that off first and run the snowball on everything after it — the ordering is a tool, not a doctrine.

Whichever order you pick, the mechanism that does the work is the same: keeping your total monthly payment fixed as individual balances fall, rather than letting the freed-up money drift back into spending.