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Allright, you have lots of debt and your creditors are hounding you. How do you cope with it and get debt relief before you have a nervous breakdown? Use this simple guide for Dateline Paying.

Dateline paying is a simple method of paying oldest bills first, by using the due date. The dateline shows you how far back in time the dates of your past due bills go. Yes, credit debt should be treated exactly like a regular past due bill. There are a few simple steps to use this method that you can do.

1 - Make a list of credit card debt and past due bills. Use a report from your accounting program or a spreadsheet of some kind and sort them in order of due date. Be sure and put in a bill for each credit card or line of credit that is more than the minimum payment.

Decide how much you want to try to pay on the credit card bill over the next few weeks before the statement due date. For example, put a bill in for $600 if your minimum payment due is $400.

2 - At the end of each business week, carve off 15% of the income to use to pay past due bills and debt. This leaves you 85% to pay current bills to keep the front door open, the lights on and the telephone ringing to get in more income.

Be sure and use some of the 85% to promote your products and services to keep customers buying, and stash away a bit as an emergency fund so you have a cushion to fall back on.

3 - Utilize the 15% to pay the debt by dateline - oldest bills first. Always use a portion of the cash to pay suppliers and part to pay credit card debt.

4 - Pay a bit towards credit card debt each week using on-line paying.

What for? Because it stops the daily interest compounding for the rest of the month on that amount you paid. This can save you many dollars in unnecessary interest charges over the long haul. It also saves you from getting hit with late charges for making late payments. Additionally, it stops the scrambling to come up with a big chunk of cash to pay the credit debt in the week the payment is actually due.

5 - Pay past due bills from suppliers - oldest bill first. The only exception is a supplier who refuses to ship more product that you need to produce more income, or one who is threatening legal action. Those are dangerous situations that must be handled immediately.

6 - Figure out how to increase your income so that you have a growing amount of money to use to work this strategy of dateline paying.

Systematically working at paying both ends of the dateline, 85% to current operating expenses and 15% to past due bills, gradually moves the dateline forward to present time until you are current on your bills and out of debt.

You can watch this dateline paying strategy working for you by making a graph of the total amount of your debt and update the figure each week so you can observe the amount of debt coming down. It helps you confront the debt you created, it acknowledges the actions you are taking to get that situation handled.