Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web: Paying off credit cardsIt's called the snowball strategy: paying off smaller debts first, to motivate yourself to dig out of credit card debt faster, said Kelli B. Grant at CNBC. A 2012 study of debt-payoff strategies from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management found that consumers using this strategy were more likely to eliminate their entire debt than those employing other approaches.