One hundred triangles from the base to the peak. Color your way up and plant the flag.
The classic debt coloring chart is a winding cartoon path of a hundred squares with a start line and a finish flag. The idea is excellent; the look is not for everyone. The Debt-Free Summit keeps the idea and loses the cartoon: a hundred identical triangles tessellated into a single mountain, drawn in clean lines, with a flag on the peak.
Each triangle is one percent of your starting balance. You color from the bottom-left corner and work upward, zigzagging along each row, so the path climbs the way the debt payoff does. The four shaded triangles are the quarter marks, numbered 25, 50, 75 and 100, with a line for each dollar amount and the date you reached it.
It is made for the fridge, the office wall or the inside of a planner, and for the kind of person who finds coloring in a shape more satisfying than ticking a box. If you prefer a plain grid, the Debt-Free Chart is the same hundred-step idea as squares; if you want a single tube to fill, the Debt Thermometer is the one.
Download the free PDF
Free, no signup, no email address. Pick your paper size; every version is one page and prints on any home printer.
The ink saver version is the same sheet in black and gray for cheap printing. Print at 100 percent, not "fit to page", so the rows stay a comfortable height for handwriting.
Rather have the numbers filled in for you? Undebt.it tracks all of this online for free, and personalized versions of these printables, built from your own plan, are on the way.
What it looks like filled in
Filled in from a sample plan with $24,520 of debt: the starting balance, the value of one triangle ($245.20), the four milestone amounts and the dates are already worked out. The triangles themselves are always yours to color, on the blank and the filled-in version alike.
Open the filled-in example as a PDF. The download buttons above give you the blank sheet.
How to use it
- Write your starting balance in the top-left box. Add up every debt; the debt tracker makes that quick.
- Divide it by 100 and write the answer in "one triangle =". On a $24,520 balance that is $245.20 a triangle.
- Color from the bottom left. Each time your total paid grows by one triangle's worth, fill the next one, left to right along the bottom row, then right to left along the next, and so on up the mountain.
- Mark the milestones. Triangles 25, 50, 75 and 100 are shaded; write the amount and the date in the boxes below when you reach each one. The flag is yours when triangle 100 is colored.
Tips that make it stick
- Use one color for regular payments and a second for windfalls, so you can see later where the jumps came from.
- Pin it where the household passes it. Coloring the next triangle is a job children are glad to be given.
- A large debt means each triangle is worth a lot and months can pass between fills. Print a second Summit for one small debt so there is always something to color.
