[Tuchman:] Some companies dish out a lot of perks like free food and game rooms to keep workers happy. Fortune Magazine just named the best companies to work for after interviewing more than 250,000 workers. Here's a look at the top five. As you see, number one, Google. Boston Consulting Group, number two. Edward Jones rounds out the top five. SAS Institute as number three and Wegman's Food Market, a number 4. There's a Wegman's in Syracuse, New York. It's indeed a good store and happy employees. The National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that 62 percent of Americans say their top financial goal for 2012 is paying down debt. But where should you start? Earlier I got a little help from financial analyst Clyde Anderson. A lot of us racked up some bills last month.
[Clyde Anderson, Financial Analyst:] Yes, a lot of bills.
[Tuchman:] Yes, a lot of bills. And January comes along and you look at these credit card bills and you figure out how do you pay them off? Should you pay them all off right away? Is that the smart thing to do?
[Anderson:] It is. That's the very smart thing to do. But you've got to have a strategy and you've got to be smart about how you do it. A lot of people just want to go and start paying maybe the highest balance or pay the lowest balance. What you really need to do is tackle the one with the highest APR. This is a smart strategy because what you're doing, you want to eliminate the one that you're paying the most interest on. By doing that, now when you get that down and then you go to the one with the next highest interest rate. And that's smart because you don't want to be paying more on these high interest rate cards just because you paid off one with a $100 balance. So you want to be strategic about that and hit those first. That's the first thing.
[Tuchman:] Should you be consolidating when you have a lot of different bills?
[Anderson:] Yes, I mean definitely. It depends on how many bills you have. So if you've got a few if you have four or five different credits with balances on them, the best strategy, again, just to go ahead and hit the one with the highest APR first. You know, it's not necessarily a lot of people consolidate when they've got massive amounts of debt which they just can't control, they want to kind of lump them all into one with one interest rate. I wouldn't recommend that until you get to that point where you're just it's out of your hands and you can't control it.
[Tuchman:] What other strategies would you recommend?
[Anderson:] Well, I've got a couple of different ones. One that people are kind of not recognizing, we have a little bit of a stimulus that we can do ourselves. Right now we have a break with payroll taxes from 6.2 to 4.2. To a lot of people it doesn't seem like a lot of money but the little things mean a lot.
[Tuchman:] I think most of us don't think about that.
[Anderson:] They don't think about it.
[Tuchman:] We say, oh, it sounds good. But we don't know how significant it can be.
[Anderson:] Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Break your calculator out. Now really kind of do the math. For the average household it's about $992 if they extend it for the rest of the year. Right now we know it's going through the end of February; February 29, 2012. If Congress can come to some terms, it's probably going to extend to the rest of the year. So there's a good chance of that happening and that's what I've been saying. Take that money and apply it towards your debt.
[Tuchman:] So, is it as smart strategy when December comes, December of 2012
[Anderson:] Yes.
[Tuchman:] which is still 11 months away
[Anderson:] Correct.
[Tuchman:] Maybe not to spend as much if it's problematic figuring out how they consolidate or how to pay off these debts.
[Anderson:] Right. I mean that's the best strategy. I mean the best strategy is to really not use so much of the credit cards. I'm one for cash use as much cash as much as possible because you pay in the end. It seems good and fine and dandy at the beginning that you're using the cards and it's easy to swipe them. We swipe until the back's gone but now, you're going to pay for it. And a lot of times you pay two times what you want to pay for cash. What's that saying here.
[Tuchman:] Speaking of cash, you know. A lot of us don't like to carry around a lot of cash. You go to a store and you're going to spend several hundred dollars for gifts and you're not going to take several hundred dollars out of your pocket.
[Anderson:] Right. Right.
[Tuchman:] The question is maybe it's smart to carry around more cash so you don't have to worry about these credit card bills. Is that something you advocate?
[Anderson:] I think for a lot of people, that's a smart strategy. And what you have to do is you have the cash in your pocket. You know exactly how much you need and then you use that cash. You won't use more. When you see the cash coming out of your handing, it's a lot different than swiping that card. It's real money.
[Tuchman:] Good advice from Clyde Anderson. Well, can you imagine getting paid for answering work e-mails when you're at home. One country's new law could mean lucrative news for its work force.