You owe money on three or four cards, the minimums keep you treading water, and someone online swears there's one correct order to pay them off.
Two strategies dominate the advice: the debt snowball and the debt avalanche.
They share the same skeleton but disagree on one thing—which balance gets your extra cash first.
The avalanche targets the highest interest rate.
You pay minimums on everything else and throw every spare dollar at the priciest debt until it's gone, then move to the next highest rate.
A card charging 27% burns money faster than one at 14%, so killing it first shrinks what you owe in interest.
The snowball ignores rates and attacks the smallest balance.
Once that's wiped out, you roll its payment into the next-smallest, and so on.
The dollars don't stretch as far on paper, but the early win arrives fast—sometimes in weeks—and that momentum is the entire point for people who've stalled out before.
On a few thousand dollars spread across cards with similar rates, the difference is often modest.
When one card carries a punishing rate and a large balance, avalanche can pull ahead by hundreds.
Neither method is a magic fix, and both assume you're paying at least the minimums on time and not adding new charges.
The research on this is more interesting than the internet debates.
Studies of real borrowers have found that people who focus on smaller balances—the snowball order—are more likely to actually finish paying things off, even when they'd save less on interest.
Closing an account outright seems to do something the math can't measure.
Here's how to choose without overthinking it.
If you have a clear, expensive rate gap and steady cash flow, avalanche likely costs you less.
If you've started and quit multiple times, or you need a visible win to stay motivated, snowball is often the one that sticks.
The best method is the one you'll still be following in month eight.
Pick one target and stop splitting extra money across all your debts—scattering payments dilutes progress.
Keep every minimum on autopay so a late fee never undoes your momentum.
Check whether a balance transfer or lower-rate consolidation makes sense, but read the fees and the post-promo rate before committing.
And if you're carrying debt while also trying to build savings, decide in advance which gets the extra dollar so you're not deciding it every month.
The honest answer is that both methods beat wandering.
The avalanche wins on arithmetic, the snowball wins on human nature, and most people underestimate how much the second one matters.
Final Thoughts
Pick the order you can live with, set it on autopay, and let the boring months do the work.