Finance
How to eliminate credit card debt: Finance expert weighs in on what steps you should take
January can be a tough time financially, especially if holiday spending leaves you with some debt. If you’re struggling financially following the holiday season, you’re not alone.
Eastgate resident, Atiana Anderson said she’s focusing on improving her financial fitness in 2025.
“My financial resolution this year is to save money. I’m hoping to save about 10 grand by the end of the year,” she said.
She said she plans to cut back on frivolous spending and pay off her credit card debt, but trying to build savings in today’s economy is no easy feat. Wilmington mother, Lindsay Clepper agrees.
“I’m a single mother, so I only have one income in the house, so it’s been really, really rough this year,” she said. “We’ve been in financial ruin. I’m just staying afloat.”
I went to financial wellness coach, Al Riddick to help find a solution. Here’s some of his advice for getting out of debt this year.
Start an emergency savings
Riddick said before you start paying down debt, you should set aside some money for emergencies.
“Hopefully people can set up an account where they can put at least $1,000 to the side,” he said. “Because something is always going to happen that’s going to impact cash flow that you don’t expect.”
Start with the smallest debt
Credit card debt can feel overwhelming. Regardless of interest rate, Riddick recommends paying down the debt with the smallest balance first.
“Because as human beings, we want to experience success as fast as possible, right? So, if you can attack that small debt, get rid of it as quickly as possible just by human nature, your self-esteem is going to go up,” Riddick said. “Your commitment to the process is going to go up as well, and the probability that you will consistently implement these behaviors is going to continue in the future.”
Keep track of your money
Riddick said it’s important to know how much money is coming in and out each month.
“A lot of people don’t even know what they get paid on a weekly or biweekly basis,” Riddick said. “Most people have no idea regarding how much their monthly expenses are because we don’t count money anymore. Everything is on direct deposit or automatic draft.”
Riddick said automatic payments do not mean you should ignore them. He said there’s no way to create an effective plan to get out of debt if you don’t understand where your money is going each month.
“When you implement a budget every month, you can almost see where you will be a year from now, five years from now, or even 10 years from now because it is really that simple,” Riddick said.
Once you determine your budget, you may decide the need for a secondary source of income. To better her finances this year, in addition to her current job, Lindsay Clepper said she’s considering enrolling in night school. “To start something else on the side, just to make the extra money to be able to get debt-free,” she said.
Pay your bill frequently
Riddick said you can take control of your finances by paying your credit card bill regularly.
“You know, there’s nothing wrong with paying your bill every week. You don’t have to wait, like, 30 days until the company sends you the bill,” Riddick said. “If you pay your bill every week, what that typically does, it heightens your level of awareness regarding what you’re doing with your money.”
When you’re paying more attention to your money, you start to notice trends or habits you may have otherwise missed.
“When you are paying more attention, more than likely, you’re like, wait a minute. I didn’t know I was spending that much money eating out or having food delivered to my home or paying this type of money on all these various subscription services,” he said. “But you know, at the end of the day, you are in control of every aspect of your financial life, but this is a power that only works when you unleash it.”
Plan for next year
Instead of repeating the cycle each year, Riddick said you should plan and save for the 2025 holiday season now.
“We know that on December 25, what’s going to happen, Christmas is coming, right?” he said.
He recommends setting up an automatic transfer from your checking to a savings account. He said for example, if you set aside $100 every month, you will have $1,200 by December set aside for holiday spending.
“Doing it that way is a lot easier than waiting around until November and then trying to come up with $1,200 that you don’t have, and that’s how people end up getting into debt,” he said. “If we know a certain event is coming up in the future, why not do yourself a favor and go ahead and plan in advance.”
Atiana Anderson had some words of encouragement for anyone experiencing credit card debt.
“Don’t be intimidated. Everything will work out for the best, even if you are struggling financially,” she said. “If you get a game plan, write it down in the notebook, and discuss it with financial planners, family members or an organization. Believe that you will get out of credit card debt or whatever situations that you have.”
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For a company navigating one of the most consequential transformations in its history, financial clarity is not optional—it is essential. Natura &Co, the Brazilian personal care and cosmetics group behind iconic brands such as Natura and Avon, has long been committed to combining purpose-driven business with commercial performance. After a period of strategic portfolio reshaping, including the divestiture of its Aesop and The Body Shop holdings, the company is now sharpening its focus on profitability and operational excellence across Latin America and global markets.
At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.
That’s now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with SAP and Numen, a global SAP partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.
From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence
The project’s goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, SAP’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in SAP S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.
The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.
“The implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in SAP S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rogério Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from SAP S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the SAP AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors—discriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.”
A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption
Natura &Co’s application derived from a prototype SAP partner Numen created in early 2024 at SAP’s global Hack2Build on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of SAP Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and SAP. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.
Numen brought deep SAP implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of SAP S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on SAP Business AI Platform. The technology stack—SAP S/4HANA, SAP AI Core, SAP Fiori, and SAP Business Technology Platform—provided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.
“SAP enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,” said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.
The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.
A blueprint for other businesses
The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running SAP S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.
The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co’s Equador operations.
Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.
“The success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,” Dias Garcia noted. “We are now ready to move forward—deepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.”
For SAP customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
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