Americans currently owe $917 billion on revolving credit lines, according to the latest Federal Reserve statistics. Almost all of it is a result of charging purchases to credit cards, and about $69 billion of it is past due.

It seems like a no-win situation for consumers carrying a balance, especially if a recent job loss has dried up the means to pay it off in a timely manner. But assuming that you have the income sufficient to pay down your credit cards, how should you approach it? Consumer Reports Money Adviser looked at several strategies:

• Paying more than the minimum. As you've probably surmised, paying only the minimum due on a card is a surefire way not to succeed. Many issuers require you to pay only 2 percent of your current balance. Assuming the annual percentage rate on your card is 18 percent, paying down at $2,000 balance with minimum payments would erase that debt sometime in 2033.

The good news is that it doesn't take much of a bump in monthly payments to retire the balance a lot faster. Using the example above, increasing your payments from 2 percent to 5 percent would pay off your balance in "only" 61/2 years. Not fast enough? Making payments of 10 percent will eliminate a $2,000 balance in 41 months.

• Paying off the card with the highest interest rate first. Mathematically, this option will result in the lowest amount of interest paid. Chances are, according to the editors of Consumer Reports Money Adviser, if you carry a monthly balance on one of your accounts, you probably do on a number of credit cards. Your cards might have a range of interest rates. By focusing most of your monthly total credit-card payment on the card that carries the highest APR, you'll quickly lower the amount of interest you're paying overall.

• Paying off the card with the lowest balance first. This is known as the "snowball approach" to paying off debt. You budget a total monthly amount to allocate among all your credit cards. Pay the minimum balance on the cards with the larger balances, and put the bulk of your payback budget toward the card with the smallest balance. When the smallest balance is paid in full, then drive all of those payments into the card with the next lowest balance.

Although you'll pay a little more in interest (unless the smallest balance is also the one with the highest APR), the number of monthly bills will decrease eventually, giving you the psychological lift that you're making progress toward retiring your debt. And having open accounts with zero balances might improve your credit score, which may in turn give you more leverage with your creditors.

• Paying the highest balance off first. Issuers are taking the axe to credit lines. Borrowers with large balances -- especially balances that equal more than 50 percent of the total line of credit -- are especially vulnerable to having their credit limits reduced. For that reason, you should strive to keep your balances below 30 percent of your credit line and pay down balances to that level as quickly as you can.

Which approach is best for you? As long as you stick to it, any of the approaches Consumer Reports Money Adviser has highlighted have merit. You can even change tactics midstream -- for instance, pay down a high-balance credit card first, then, when that balance is below 30 percent of the credit line, switch to paying the card with the highest APR.

The greatest challenge will be resisting the temptation to backslide toward making only minimum payments.

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