One of the biggest psychological hurdles of being in debt is sorting it all out. It can be very easy to just see a pile of minimum monthly payments. You pay them like every other bill and forget about them. Your mortgage, your credit card, your car payment and your student loans become nothing more than the cost of living. You know this practice will keep you in debt forever, but you stay in survival mode just “one more month.”
At some point, you’ll realize you can’t spend any more time in debt. You’ll get serious about righting your financial ship and you’ll make a debt repayment plan. When that time comes, a new website, unbury.me, can help you out.
Unbury.us couldn’t be simpler. You put in a list of your debts. You include the balance of the loans, your minimum payments and the interest rates. It’ll show you how long it’ll take you to get out of debt by making just the minimums. If the tool stopped working there, it’d be an effective wakeup call. But Unbury.us has a few more features to bring greater value.
Using the bar at the top, you can increase how much you’re spending every month on debt repayment and pick between different debt repayment methods. You can use “snowball” repayment, where you pay off the smallest debt first, and then use that money to pay off the second largest, and so on. As an alternative, you can use “avalanche” repayment; that puts all the extra toward paying off the biggest balance, then works on the smaller ones. You can see the effects in a handy line graph that displays how long until you’re debt free. Each debt’s monthly payment is displayed for a simple, visual representation that makes it real.
Unbury.us has some limitations. It doesn’t allow a great deal of nuance in repayment plans, and the month-by-month data can be a little hard to read. Still, it’s free and fast. If you’re ready to kick debt once and for all, Unbury.us can be the help you’ve been waiting for.