Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

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.

With Google Spreadsheets.

I’m a professional spreadsheet jockey. I used to work in A/R, A/P, book revenue, audit charges, report monthly figures, all that good stuff. I love it!

Lately since I am have been disconnected from computing while not at work, and desirous of manipulating numbers while at my house, work, and my boyfriend’s place, I’ve come to rely more heavily on Google Spreadsheets.

Mind you, it’s not perfect and I love Excel. But it really does serve a need I have to input data from multiple places, review it at various times and then share it out when I feel like it. Showing boyfriend my monthly budget and why there is nothing to cut but what I eat (which is the source of my greatest pleasures in life) helped me figure out that I’m still on track even when I feel crushed. Rather than cut and paste some text, I can manipulate the numbers, save and tell him there’s something new to look at. How romantic! I know. I’m a real softie.

At any rate, I admit to hating Google Spreadsheets at first precisely because I do some advanced user things with Excel, but slowly I’m getting used to it and I am starting to love its convenience.

If you need:
a monthly budget
to recalculate your paycheck at a different 401k contribution rate
your stock trades and their rate of return and dividend payouts
to track the costs of remodeling your home
your auto expenses
to log your miles run, calories eaten/expended, pounds lost

Try Google Spreadsheets!