How to best manage debt with Simplifi?

Beelz

New user here! So I ended up letting my finances get waaay out of hand and racked up about 50k in debt across multiple credit cards and a personal loan. Decided to try Simplifi to help me get a handle on my money in flow and out flows so I can see what fat I can trim off to put more towards knocking down the debts.

When using the application it seems to be very much setup for folks that are on top of things. You see your money coming in and budget around categories for where it goes, then create spending plans and goals for things like vacations and buying a car or new home. That is all great, but I'm not seeing any tool or emphasis on how to use it in managing and shrinking debt.

So question to all the lovely folks out there, how do you do this in Simplifi? Do you add each credit card as a goal to be paid off or add recurring bills for how much you are trying to put towards each card each month? Or am I missing something all together?

Thanks for any and all answers!

Coach Natalie

Hello @Beelz,

Thanks for posting!

Hopefully some other Users come along with great feedback and advice for you on how they manage their debt in Simplifi, however, Simplifi doesn't currently offer any debt management tools specifically, unfortunately.

Personally, with what's currently available in Simplifi, I would most likely elect to create Recurring Series' for my various debts and then make sure to include them in my Spending Plan so I'm able to budget the payments.

We do also have a couple of existing Idea posts that you may be interested in adding your vote and feedback to:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/626/debt-tracking-on-a-graph-edited/p1?new=1

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/440/debt-snowball#latest

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie

Jedp

Natalie is exactly right. Make a decision as to how much you want to pay each month for each credit card or loan and then setup a recurring series for it. Then, you can easily use the Spending Plan to see if those payment sizes will fit into your budget. If it shows your budget in a deficit, then you can look at each of your planned expenses and see if you can "trim the fat", or reduce a savings goal (to me you have to have an emergency fund, but beyond that you don't save more until your debt is reduced, but that's just my mindset). Once you have this setup, you can tweak it each month as you start paying down your debt. Personally, I'm a big fan of Dave Ramsey's "debt snowball" where you get rid of your smallest debts first (regardless of interest rates) and work your way up, but there are a lot of other methods for attacking this as well. Any plan you decide on for eliminating debt will work great with the Spending Plan because you can adjust and play with the numbers until you have a plan that works for your budget. The next piece is the discipline to stay within the plan, but that's a subject for another day!

Beelz

Thanks @Coach Natalie

I definitely upvoted those as I think this would be highly valuable features for folks. I imagine that most coming in to use a tool like Simplifi to manage finances have a similar trigger that lead them to purchase this, which is their finances got out of control and found themselves in debt. (If things are going great, they are less likely to need a tool). 

One thing I added to one of those forums is a recommendation I think I found in Simplifi help documents, which is Unbury.me - A free web app that allows you to put in your different debt accounts with their interest rates and then see what payoff looks likes between Avalanche and Snowball methods along with slider for how much you can put towards the debt. This would be exactly what we need in Simplifi and looks like a fairly straightforward tool to build ( or even acquire to put into the app).

Hopefully this will get some traction soon as this is a primary use case for me.