When you're drowning in credit card debt, you may be finding it harder and harder to make a dent in the principal owed. Interest, fees and penalties are already piling up and adding to your balance. If you miss enough payments and your credit score drops, the credit card companies may raise your interest rate even more, which makes it feel like a vicious cycle.

In this economy, a lot of people are racking up credit card debt because of lost jobs or reductions in income. It can be so easy to use your credit cards to tide you over during what you hope is a temporary setback, instead of sharply cutting back on your spending. Unfortunately, in the current recession, "temporary setbacks" are often not as temporary as we hoped or expected.

Of course, the best way to avoid racking up bad debt after an income reduction is to immediately cut back on your spending and stop using your credit cards except in emergencies. Unfortunately, many people are way beyond that point.

So what should you do if you find yourself with $10,000, $20,000 or even $30,000 in credit card debt? Should you consider filing bankruptcy? Should you try to pay it off? Can you pay it off?

The only way to decide if paying off that debt is even possible is to run the numbers. Assuming that you stop using all your credit cards, how much extra money could you find in your budget to start paying them off?

Once you've determined a realistic amount you could start adding to your credit card payments each month, plan as if you were going to pay only what you typically pay on all of your cards but one -- the one with the highest interest rate. If you add all of the extra money to that monthly payment, how long would it take to pay off the card? There are online calculators that can help you figure that out.

When you finished paying that card off, you would add the full amount you had been paying to the higher-interest card to the payment of the one with the second-highest interest rate. When that debt was gone, you would add the full amount you had been paying to the previous cards to the payments on the next one. The point is, even as your debt starts to go down, you never reduce your payments, so the money adds up.

Once you've run the numbers, you'll know how many years it will take to pay off your credit cards, as long as you can follow your plan. If your plan doesn't seem realistic, it may be time to talk to a bankruptcy attorney.

Source: Bankrate.com, "Pay off $30K in card debt," Steve Bucci, Sept. 26, 2011