Debt Free Box: Snowball Payoff 4+

balance calculation issues and no app support

They market this as FREE but it’s only free for 2 or less debts. Then you need to “upgrade to Pro” which includes everything advertised as free ( snowball method, payoff options, unlimited number of debts,etc.) Just be transparent about the pro version because it’s more cost efficient than other well known apps on the market. Pros: simple to use. Plug in the numbers and the app does the calculations to include a snowball method. A plus is not having to link accounts (for added security). Seeing the decreasing debt and nearing/hitting payoff dates is a feeling like no other. Cons: Can’t adjust balances if the debt amount increases/decreases. Ex. If you paid a little more or added a charge on a credit card. You can change the total amount but my experience has been it throws off the payoff calculation terribly, meaning the math wasn’t adding up correctly and there wouldn’t have been a way to fix it but to delete and readd which I didn’t want to do and lose the tracking on my progress. Some weeks later the app caught up and corrected the issue. But I’m hesitant to go through that again. Overall: This has been extremely helpful for me and how my brain works. Budgeting and paying debt is hard enough without having trackers being complicated. This gets to the point. Pay this amount on this date to achieve this result. The end! I started using the savings tracker and plan to try the bill tracker as well.

Exactly what I need

Not too complicated. I manually update some numbers now and then, and that is always gratifying and keeps me aware of what’s going on. Snowball is super. I with there was a way to organize by amount owed, not just originating debt. It might just be a glitch, but could be super helpful if it could list the debt in that fashion. It’s 5 stars because compared to all the others out there, it’s leaps and bounds better.

Developer Response ,

Hi,

thank you very much for nice words and rating. Also, thanks for noticing what seem to be a glitch - I will put it in our issues list to see how to improve experience with sorting options.

Andrey @ Debt Free Box team

Buggy

It will not allow you to set the initial balance or the next payment even though they are clear options. This includes on the $5 version:

The initial balance option just straight up won’t let you type anything in it. I tried playing around with the balance date and it didn’t effect it.

The next payment no matter what you set it to will default to the next month on the balance date. So if you have, for example, student loans on hold… you cannot set the balance date to present day in Oct 2021 and mark the next payment date to Jan 2022. Here’s how exactly that looks on the user side:

Balance date: 20 Oct 2021
Next payment date: 1 Jan 2022, the selectors auto rotated back to 20 Nov 2022. Same thing happens for all dates in 2022 from Jan-Oct. so it looks like there is some coding telling the month box to not allow a payment date before the current month regardless of the year & day.

Balance date: 20 Oct 2021
Next payment date: 1 Nov or Dec 2022, allows you to set it but once you hit save it will start payments on 1 Nov 2021. Again, looks like the coding it not allowing your next payment date to be set separate of your Balance date which took me a while of playing around with to figure out what was going wrong. Once the UX/UI is fixed there I’m happy to up my rating & update this review.