March 2016 Update: Fixes for the debt snowball table
I just activated some changes to the debt snowball table today that I’ve been working on for quite a while now. There are two main areas that were addressed:
- The current month (month #1 on the table) has never accounted for payments already made for the month. Now you can see what you’ve already paid and if there is any more due on the debt for the month. For example, if you have a debt that you need to pay $500 for the month and you make a $300 payment at the beginning of the month, you’ll see the $300 payment and also that you still need to pay the other $200. It should be much more accurate overall.
- Deferred payments are now supported. This is useful if you have a student loan that you don’t currently pay anything on. Just set the debts’ due date to the point in the future where your payments will begin and it will be correct on the debt snowball table. The debt account doesn’t have to be a student loan for this to work, you can use it on any type of debt. For example, if you don’t a payment due next month on a loan, you can set the due date for the month after. One important thing to note is that the deferred amounts will be added to your debt snowball and reallocated to other accounts if needed.
Deferred Payments: Note how the total payments stay the same over the course of time. The money not being paid on the student loan is automatically re-allocated to other debts.
Even though I’ve tested these changes out, there are so many different payoff scenarios that there could be problems. Just let me know if you run into anything odd and I’ll check it out. Also the excel export doesn’t have these new changes added yet – I hope to have them added in within a week or two. As always, thanks for spreading the word about the site.
I’m new to your site and I absolutely love it. It replaces my excel spreadsheet method. I’m also a software developer so I really appreciate how much you’ve put into this.
I have a question though. It seems that when I put in a payment transaction, the due date on that bill gets automatically moved to the next month. Then when I go to the snowball table page, the snowball payment gets moved to another bill for this month. Is that expected behavior? It works as I expect it to if I make sure to change the due date back to this month after making the payment, but it took me a while to figure that out.