This is the best way to pay off a credit card.  This technique can also be used to pay off any other type of debt or to save or invest money.  As long as you have a specific goal in mind, this technique will work.

1. Set aside a few minutes a day for a daily financial checkin.  This checkin is a time in the day, preferably in the morning, when you set aside time to spend time with your financial goal.  In this case,  the goal is to pay off a credit card.  This daily financial checkin only needs to take a few minutes.
2. Start a Google Sheet with the date in column A and the credit card balance in column B.  Every day at your financial checkin, record the date and your credit card balance.
3. Once you have recorded your balance, make a small payment on the credit card.
4. Celebrate that your balance today is smaller than yesterday!

It’s that simple.  Why does this work?  Doing the checkin every day communicates to your subconscious that this goal is important.  Once your subconscious understands the importance, it will work in the background to make it a reality throughout the day.  Small things will start to happen.  You will start to make different decisions throughout the day that support your goal.  You might decide not to buy something that you would normally buy but don’t necessarily need because you would rather save that money for the credit card payment that you’ll make on your next checkin.

People often continue to buy on credit cards because they have not set up a reward for NOT making a purchase and so the choice looks like this:

Choice A – Buy this thing which is fun, gives a dopamine hit, and provides instant gratification of some sort.

Choice B – Don’t buy this thing, and don’t get any dopamine hit or any gratification.

 By setting up a daily financial checkin and daily small credit card payments, you are changing the choices to the following

Choice A – Buy this thing which is fun, gives a dopamine hit, and provides instant gratification of some sort.

Choice B – Don’t buy this thing, instead save the money and add it to my credit card payment for tomorrow, get a dopamine hit when I see my credit card balance smaller than before.

One way to make this even more powerful is to put the credit card app on your phone and literally make the credit card payment at the exact same time that you are choosing to not buy the thing that you normally would have bought.

Celebrate!  One of the keys to this is to celebrate each time you finish your checkin or make a payment.  The celebration can be as simple as spending a few seconds feeling good about what you just did.  This works because by celebrating, you are associating pleasure to making credit card payments.