Shed excess holiday debt.(Your Money)

'Tis the season--to pay up, that is. For the better part of the year, millions of prudent consumers carefully manage their credit-card debt and try to pay off their balance in full each month. But with the end of the holiday travel and shopping season, they may get hit with a blizzard of bills that can take many months to melt away.

According to CardTrak, an online consumer-credit research group, U.S. consumers used their credit cards an astonishing 1.6 billion times between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, on their way to racking up a record $108 billion in charges. The result: an average bill per household of $850--up from some $500 in 1994.

But just as taking off the extra pounds that seem to creep on during the holidays makes you look and feel better physically, trimming down on spending and getting rid of that excess burden on credit cards will make you or someone you know healthier fiscally. Speeding up debt repayment can save you a bundle on interest charges, as shown in the chart at right. It's also a good idea to keep credit lines clear for emergencies--an unforeseen auto or home repair, or a health or job setback that cuts into your income.

This report can help put you--or a temporarily overextended friend--on a course to get out from under credit-card debt in a quick and disciplined way. Our step-by-step approach shows how to find the extra cash to pay down bills, explains how to develop a repayment plan, and provides strategies to ensure that holiday borrowing won't get you into the same predicament next year.

STEP 1: PUT CARDS IN THE DEEP FREEZE

You can't begin to free yourself of debt until you break out of the credit-card habit, and the time to begin is in the two to three weeks after the holidays, before your holiday-season credit-card statements start showing up in your mailbox. A practical way to curb spending is to put yourself on a weekly cash allowance. Visit your local bank-branch ATM on Monday morning and withdraw the amount of cash you calculate you'll need to cover basic expenses through Friday. Then stop by the machine again on Friday evening and withdraw what you think you'll need to carry you through the weekend. "If you find you run out of cash by Wednesday, you'll find you're able to pinpoint where you wasted your cash," says Delia Fernandez, a Los Alamitos, Calif., financial planner.

STEP 2: TIGHTEN UP ON SPENDING