Allright, you have lots of debt and the creditors are screaming. How do you handle it and get debt relief before you have a nervous breakdown? Use a simple tool called Dateline Paying.

Dateline paying is a simple way to pay oldest bills first, based on the due date. The dateline tells you how far back in time your past due bills go. And yes, credit debt is treated exactly like any other past due bill. Here are a few simple steps to use this method that you can do.

1 - List out credit card debt and past due bills. Use a spreadsheet or a report from your accounting program and sort them by due date. Be sure and put in a bill for more than the minimum payment for each credit card.

Make the credit card bill for the amount you want to try to pay over the few weeks before the payment is actually due. For example, put a bill in for $600 if your minimum payment due is $400.

2 - At the end of your business week, carve off 15% of the income to use to pay past due bills and debt. Use the remaining 85% to pay current operating expenses to keep the doors open, the lights on and the telephone ringing to get in more income.

It is important that you use part of the remaining 85% to promote your products and services so customers keep 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. Make sure to use a portion of it to pay suppliers and part to pay credit card debt.

4 - Pay something towards credit card debt each week by paying on-line.

Why? 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 time. It also keeps you from being late on your payments and avoiding the late payment charges. In addition, it eliminates the mad scramble to come up with a big chunk of cash to pay the credit debt in the week the statement says the payment is due.

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

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

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

You can easily see this dateline paying strategy working for you by making a graph of the total amount of your debt and update the number each week so you can observe the total of the debt coming down. It helps you confront the debt you created, it validates the effort you are putting into getting the situation handled for good.