In What Order Should You Pay Off Debt?

In what order should you pay off debt?

I have several loans outstanding. In what order do I pay them off?

OK, so there are a couple of different ways to approach them — both, it's sort of a weird snow analogy. So, make a list of the loans you have outstanding, the balances and the interest rates. Now, the snowball method is you start with the smallest loan you've got, right Deedi? OK, the smallest loan you've got. You pay that off first, then you pay the next in size, the next in size, the next in size. So the snowball sort of builds, if that analogy works for you. The other is the avalanche method, where you start off with the highest interest rate, you pay that one off first, then the second highest, third highest, fourth highest. Now I happen to be a fan of the avalanche method, because it saves you money, but a lot of people can find the snowball method to be more motivating because you're sort of checking the boxes, you've got the first one paid off. OK?

What's the Fed gonna do?

In the never-ending series of "nobody knows," today, three-quarters of economists believe that the next move by the Fed is down. Back in March, not that long ago, two-thirds believed it was up. So all things being equal, I guess it's going to be down? But following the economists will give you whiplash.

More from GZERO Media

A robot waiter, serving drinks at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, in Paris, on May 24, 2024.

  • Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, speaking your order into your menu, and immediately watching a robot arrive with your food. Imagine the food being made quickly, precisely — and without a human involved, because the entire restaurant is fully roboticized.

- YouTube

Forget the fancy cars, futuristic gadgets, and martinis “shaken, not stirred.” In his book "Sell Like a Spy: The Art of Persuasion from the World of Espionage", Jeremy Hurewitz tells GZERO's Tony Maciulis that intelligence officers are a lot more like therapists than James Bond-style action heroes.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI, Rama Duwaji, MIRA NAIR, MAMOOD MAMDANI during an election night event at The Brooklyn Paramount Theater in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
(Photo by Neil Constantine/NurPhoto)

Last Tuesday, a self-identified democratic socialist who ran on making New York affordable for the 99% won the city’s mayoral race in a landslide, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. And the reactions have been predictably hysterical.

A fruit and vegetable stall is lit by small lamps during a blackout in a residential neighborhood in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 6, 2025, after massive Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure in October.
(Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto)

As a fourth winter of war approaches, Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy grid faster than it can be rebuilt.