<prompt> Human: Hello PF,I am a long time lurker and I felt it was finally time for me to voice myself and get an opinion. I have gotten myself into a situation that I am not proud of. I am 25 years old and I have a steady job where I bring in a high salary per year. I got the job right out of college and thought that I should get a credit card. I used it a bunch because I thought I would easily be able to pay it with my earnings so it didnt matter. However, once I got to the limit on that card I thought to myself that there should be no reason why I couldnt get another one since I will be able to pay off that one as well. Fast forward a couple of years and now I am stuck with paying over 400 a month on my credit cards that total just about 11k at 22 and I dont see a way out any time soon. I had a couple of questions that I wanted to ask to see if I could get some help. First off, I have not made a purchase on any credit card for over a year. I finally got it through my head that I would end up in a very bad situation if I kept going. I have been paying 419 a month on those cards combined for more than a year. The minimum payment amount on those cards has slowly decreased but I decided to stick with the payment that I have been making in hopes to pay it off faster. Is this a viable solution to where my payments toward the principal amount will grow as the charges go down? I got to a point where the past couple of months the interest charge has gone up by a couple of dollars and I do not know why. Is there anything that could cause this?What are my best options of getting through this debt in the least amount of time possible?would it make sense to take money out of my 401k as a loan to pay off the remaining balance and then essentially pay the interest on that back to myself? would that be a cheaper option?I am not sure what to do and I could use all the help that I can get. I have talked to banks and so forth about consolidating all of them and putting them on a lower interest account but I was not approved for any of those.Thank you for taking the time to read my situation and trying to help me out.Assistant: Is 400 really all you can spare to pay your debt? Can you cut more expenses in your budget?Human: At this moment in time yes. I am currently working on creating an emergency funda good amount of savings before I focus everything in to this. with paying the 400 a month I am paying almost 100 more than the minimum at this point and I am hoping that the gap will continue to widen as I make more payments of this amount.  <response>: working on creating an emergency funda good amount of savingsWhy? People in this sub usually say that credit card debt IS an emergency. In a savings account, your money will earn 1 a year, while your credit card debt is increasing by 22. If you have 1000 in an emergency fund, all of your available money should go to the credit card debt. 