As much as I love Quicken, I like finding free online tools I can suggest to my personal finance counseling clients. While browsing resources for counselors, I found the Utah State University Extension site PowerPay.
Basically it’s a no-frills debt management program that allows a person to enter their debts and interest rates and develop a Debt Snowball plan or pay off highest debts first. I think letting a person choose their preferred method is great. That will allow them to choose which method motivates them the most. Too often, I think personal finance software forces people to take the mathematically rational path, but in reality, they need to do what works for them.
Another feature that I like in PowerPay is the ability to add extra payments into the mix and select if they are periodic or one-time. After you enter them, then you can see an amortization/payment schedule and witness how to direct all your payments over time. I find other tools won’t let you include multiple extra payments like Christmas and birthday gift money, a quarterly bonus, etc. Other tools just aren’t that flexible.
Probably the best part is that you can configure your debts to have expiring introductory rates too. I find that pretty important when figuring out how to optimize payments over a long period of time. A teaser rate with a long duration can hugely influence your best plan of attack on debt repayment.
PowerPay lets you export your payment schedule to Excel and save your information from session to session. That might be a good thing to print out and remind yourself each month where you want to be. But let me stress, that it’s not a super jazzy website with a lot of features. There is an emergency fund savings feature and a loan consolidation feature as well, but I didn’t really give them a huge try since I’m not as interested in those features.
PowerPay does ask what state you are from before you begin. They do that because the Extension programs are subsidized by the USDA and they need to keep statistics about the community they serve to maintain funding levels. For a free service available to anyone with internet access, it’s a great educational tool so don’t let that be an obstacle to giving it a try if you need a free debt reduction planner.
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Oh man, I was just working on this exact same thing for my suite of excel financial calculators! I’m still debugging the VBA and adding charts. Crud, need to get my act in gear. Can you post screenshots at all? That way I can see what I’m up against and make mine better
Frank! You are so competitive! Just try the tool! I’m not going to do your software analysis for you! I do that for work.
Goofball.
Fine, I’ll do that later tonight. I just thought it was funny, because I was working on the exact same thing. Now the software arms race will begin!
Neat! I’ve been using whatsthecost.com, which sounds very similar; it has a basic snowball calculator, and allows you to track payments and such. The “big picture” of my snowball is still pretty depressing though… “with this minimum payment, you’ll be debt-free in 43 months!” *facepalm*
THANK YOU!!!! I luckily stumbled across your blog. I LOVE THIS WEBSTE, thank you so much for the link.
In 2009 I will be debt-free and have a hefty savings in the bank, thank you for the tools to reach my goal.
It takes a great amount of diligence and time to build a good credit report and earn a great credit score; however, just a few financial mistakes can lead to a poor credit report, which can have dire consequences on an individual’s life. Most people that have bad credit want to find a way to improve their credit scores quickly so that they will be able to get their lives back on track.
Although applying for loans is very hard, many companies are providing good services to the people just to pay back the money. The loan can only be a good way for seeking opportunities and fulfilling the desires but it will become a frustration if the borrower will not pay the money in time.
I was working on the exact same thing. Now the software arms race will begin!
Great tool. The ability to add overpayments helps reduce loan cost which really aids in identifying the true cost of the loan. If your looking for a mortgage spreadsheet with no macros to use as a tool to determine how quickly you could pay off your loan or mortgage check out our tools section on our site. Im not here to spam, its a genuine good tool.