Every card. Every personal loan. Every buy-now-pay-later installment you've forgotten you agreed to.
The house is excused. The car is case-by-case. We’re in Singapore and these are expensive long-term commitments, we understand.
Everything else has to go.
Singapore is rolling over more debt than ever.
Credit card debt here is not a fringe problem.
MAS figures show the rollover balance on Singapore credit cards reached $9.64 billion in the 2nd quarter of 2026. This is the highest on record, climbing steadily from $8.3 billion at the end of 2024.
Rollover balance means the money that didn't get paid off and is now compounding, typically somewhere between 26% and 28% a year, calculated daily.
In that same quarter, banks wrote off $138.1 million as bad debt.
That's not people being reckless. That's people being 1 emergency behind, month after month, exactly as we described in Step 1.
The gap between the two kinds of cardholder.
Researchers at NUS studied 180,000 credit card users in Singapore, and the split was stark.
People who cleared their card each month carried an average balance of $152.
People who rolled over carried an average of $2,066.
Same card. Same bank. 13x the balance, and all of it compounding.
The same study found something hopeful. When MAS's credit suspension rules kicked in and borrowers hit a hard stop, those rolling over cut their debt by 9.9% - about $188 a month.
The money was there. The deadline was what was missing.
The debt snowball is how you give yourself that deadline, on purpose, before someone imposes one on you.
What’s “debt snowball”?
List every debt from smallest balance to largest. Ignore the interest rates for a moment.
Pay the minimum on all of them except the smallest. Then attack the smallest one with everything you have.
When it's cleared, take the whole payment you were making on it and throw it at the next one up. That payment gets bigger every time a debt falls.
That's the snowball. It starts slow and ends really fast.
Why smallest first, and when not to.
Because the thing that gets you out of debt is actually finishing.
Every account you close is 1 fewer minimum payment, 1 fewer due date, 1 less thing on your mind. Momentum is what carries people through the 18 months this takes.
We'll be straight with you about the limit, though.
When one debt is costing you far more than the others, the maths wins and that one goes first. Smallest first, unless something on your list is on fire. Then put out the fire.
That is exactly why we treat the car case-by-case.
What you're really buying.
Not just a lower monthly outflow. Though wiping payment after payment off your bills is its own kind of joy.
You're buying back your income.
When you are debt-free, you finally choose how to live, instead of being obliged just to pay.