How to clear your credit cards

If you have outstanding balances on several different credit cards, you may be able to reduce your debt more quickly by shuffling balances from one card to another. This is worth considering if any of your existing cards have promotions such as 0% balance transfer offers for existing customers, or if one of your cards has a particularly low rate.

Shuffling your balances gives you a way of cutting the amount of interest you're paying without getting a new card - you'll simply be swapping your balances between cards you already have.

Cheap balance transfer offers used to be reserved for new customers only as an 'introductory offer' to lure in new business. However many card providers must focus on retaining customers as well as drawing in new ones, so you may find that one or more of the credit cards you already have are offering 0% balance transfer deals.

Even if none of the cards you currently have are running a promotional rate, it may be that one of your cards applies interest at a lower rate than all of the others. If this is the case, and you have a sufficient credit limit, then it may still be worth your while shuffling more expensive balances to this card as the end result will still be that you pay less interest.

You will need to make sure that the interest rate you'll be charged on new balance transfers is what you expect it to be, as some providers will charge more after an initial introductory window has ended.

To get the ball rolling you'll need to:

• check which of your credit cards offers the best deal on balance transfers
• call up this card's provider and ask to make a balance transfer
• move as much of your debt from your more expensive cards to this cheaper card
• work towards paying the balance off at a cheaper rate

If the credit limit on your cheapest card won't stretch to cover a balance transfer of all your existing debts then you may want to consider moving the rest to the next cheapest card. This will mean that you pay as little interest as possible while you're working on clearing your credit cards.

It's also worth checking whether you have a credit card that allows you to make money transfers as part of the balance transfer deal as this would enable you to shuffle other outstanding debts as part of the cheap balance transfer deal too.