New Feature: Debt Payoff Tool by Boldin | Compare Strategies & Pay Off Debt Faster

Hi everybody, my name is Erin, I am a product designer here at Bolden and today I am very excited to walk you through one of the newest features that my team and I have been working on, the Debt Payoff it's for so if you've ever taken a look at a stack of your debts and wondered, you know, where do I even start? What debt should I pay off first, how much should I be paying on all these debts and most importantly, what do these debts mean for my financial standing and long term financial health, then this feature might just help. Broadly speaking, the Debt Payoff Explorer brings all your debts into one consolidated view and helps you compare different debt pay down strategies like the Debt Snowball or the Debt Avalanche. The benefits of this Explorer are quite simple but super valuable and powerful. So first you'll get clarity on all your debts because you get to see all your debts, their related interest rates, your balances, as well as your payoff plan in one simplified view. Second, you'll also have full control of your debt payoff journey by exploring how big or small changes could impact your payoff timeline as well as how much interest you're paying on these debts over time. And then finally, and most importantly, you can use the Step Payoff Explorer to identify savings in your real life by finding ways to reduce the interest you're paying and pay off your debts in a sustainable way that works for you and your personal plan. So let's dive in to the planner.

And see what this looks like in practice. Before we begin, there are a couple of best practices that you'll want to consider before diving into the Explorer. So the first thing is I highly recommend revisiting the My Plan section to confirm that all your information is up to date.

So here I will click on my.

Plan and then I will go into steps in the left hand navigation. Here you can see that Debbie is managing five debts, two college loans, two credit cards as well as an auto loan. You can always add another non mortgage debt by hitting this button down at the bottom. If you do have a mortgage, don't forget to go to your home and real estate section to make sure that your mortgage information is up to date. So here you can find a mortgage under the primary residence or or if you have any other owned real estate with a mortgage, you can have that here as well once you confirm that all this information is correct and up to date. Now we can go into the Explorer. So you can find the Explorer by going into Explorers and then hitting the Debt Payoff Explorer. The first thing you're going to do is you're telling the Explorer which debts you'd like to include in the debt payoff strategy that you're about to build. So I just walked you through the My Plan section. You can see her five non mortgage debts as well as her one mortgage. In the scenario that I'm walking you through, Debbie decides to exclude her mortgage and keep paying those payments on a fixed schedule.

So the great thing about this Explorer.

Is that it lets you focus your strategy on the debts where you have some flexibility. I'll go ahead and select all these debts and go to the next page. Here you'll enter your current minimum payments for the debts you selected. I've already gone in and found entered these minimum payments, but you can check your most recent statements for these amounts for each of those debts that you include. Knowing your minimum payment helps us understand the baseline for your plan and accurately calculate how different strategies and payment amounts could shorten your timeline and reduce interest. After you put in all your minimum payments, it's time to decide how much you can pay on all these debts in aggregate each month. You can see here that in Debbie's plan she's currently paying $1,700 a month across all these debts, which is about $545 more than the minimum payment. Using this monthly payment box on the right, she can explore how paying a little bit more or a little bit less can impact her payment timeline. So let me show you what that look, if she decides to continuously pay $1,700 per month across all these five debts, you can see that her debt payoff date is in 2029. If she has an extra $300 laying around, she can up it to 2000, which speedens her payoff timeline to 2028. Just for the sake of this example, I will keep that at 1,700. Now let's see this impact a little bit more in depth. By just scrolling down, you'll see the difference in several areas. Even when you're paying the same amount of $1,700 every single month, you may be able to see a difference in your debt freedom date, your total interest paid, as well as your calculated net worth at retirement, you can also see.

Which debt would be the first one.

To be paid off and when that will be. Here you can see a couple benefits of each strategy. Avalanche has a month faster payoff, they receiving about $2,000 in total interest paid and they have a little bit higher of a net worth by the time that they retire. Snowball on the other Hand has a benefit in your earliest debt payoff. You can see that the earliest debt paid off is one full year before the avalanche strategy, and that would be the retail card. So after comparing these two strategies, Debbie decides to go with the Snowball strategy because she knows she's gonna need those early wins and checking off debts off her list helps her stay motivated. After selecting a strategy, we've moved on to the final page. The Explorer will then provide a detailed plan to help you pay off your debts with the things that you entered. So just to jog your memory, we said we were paying $1,700 a month. We picked the Snowball strategy and we can pay off debts by 2029 with a total $14,588 in lifetime interest paid. We also provide a couple charts to help you throughout the process. We have their debt payment schedule, our debt balance over time, as well as our interest payments. Starting with the debt payment schedule, this shows you how much to pay for each debt over time. You can also dive deeper into the table below to look at your month by month breakdown. Our second tab, Debt Balance Over Time shows you how your balances are planned to decrease throughout your repayment schedule. And then finally, lifetime interest payments reveal how much you'll pay in interest over the course of of your payoff timeline. Under the Debt Payment Schedule tab, you can also scroll down and see milestones for when each specific debt will be paid off.

Here, based on the snowball, we will.

Be paying off the smallest balance first. Now, if you are satisfied with the plan, you can scroll up to the top and export your payment schedule to help guide your payoff process. This feature aims to help you kind of look at the short term as well as the long term impact of.

Debt on your financial plan.

And while long term planning helps you see the potential impact of different strategies.

We know that debt can fluctuate from.

Month to month and life changes may impact your plan. So we recommend visiting the Debt Payoff Explorer every month to keep your details and payoff plan up to date.

We built this tool because we know that managing debts, especially managing multiple debts debts, is one of the biggest hurdles on people's journey to financial wellness. But here at Bolden, we really believe that knowing, naming and having a plan for all your debts is key in building confidence in your financial journey as well as longer term planning. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to subscribe to Bolden's YouTube channel for more tips and guidance on how to set up your Bolden plan And if you haven't already, you can try Bolden's Planner for free, as well as the Debt Payoff Explorer to build your Debt Payoff plan.