Unbury.me – A Loan Calculator to Become Debt Free | Hacker News Reader

Unbury.me – A Loan Calculator to Become Debt Free

unbury.me

46 pointscaminocorner17 comments

This looks like it’s bee inspired by Dave Ramsey. Great project. I’ve been debt free for 4 years now and I intend to stay this way.

I was debt free, then back in debt for 5 years, and am again debt free, minus a company (my own) paid vehicle lease. The difference for mindset is pretty impactful.

Why would you choose the snowball strategy?

If you have a bunch of small loans with small interest and a large loan with high interest, I can’t see any reason to get rid of the small loans fast, at the cost of paying of the big one.

If you have many small, high interest loans and a large low interest loan, then there is no difference between the avalanche strategy and the snowball.

Unless there are clauses around fines for early termination of a loan, you generally pay off the minimum for all loans, and whatever is left in the budget for loan payments goes towards the highest interest loan.

People like to see payments going away. It gives them a sense of progress.

Unless you specify some fairly extreme numbers, the difference between the two strategies is pretty small. And, either strategy is better than staying in debt.

Because mathematics isn't the primary factor in getting out of debt, motivation is.

Achieving small goals keeps you focused and working on getting out of debt.

It's a lot easier to keep working if every couple of months you "hit a checkpoint" than if you're years with seemingly no progress

Amusing to see people on hackernews advocating for mathematically inferior debt repayment strategies because of “feelings”.

Others gave some very good reasons in replies. I'd just add one more - when you pay off smallest loan, you should take the money for its monthly payment and direct it towards the next smallest loan. That way you'll pay off that one much faster! Then you take that amount and direct it towards the next one etc. Trust me, debts are falling down very quickly this way!

Yes, but you'd pay the highest interest one off even faster if you direct all your spare cash to it, then you can pay off the smaller/lower loans really, really quickly by directing the money for that monthly payment to them.

Snowballing has no money or speed benefit. The only reason to do it is the psychological "Yay! I've paid it off" boost.

Not necessarily. Counter example - if highest interest loan has outstanding balance of $100,000, car loan $5,000, credit card $1,000 and you owe to your friend $500.

Can you explain your counterexample? Perhaps with with some rates? I don't understand it.

I can't see how it is would be financially beneficial to accelerate the payment of the smaller/cheaper loans over the biggest/costliest one.

I'll concede that paying back your friend sooner than they expect might have a goodwill benefit, but not a monetary one. Even then, I'm not sure how much, over just giving it to them when they asked.

It’s not financially beneficial. The poster you replied to has no idea what he’s talking about. Repaying the highest interest loan first will still be the best choice.

I agree with you overall. However, I think I what you’re missing is the value of eliminating the minimum payments so that you can consolidate on the higher interest loans.

> Why would you choose the snowball strategy?

I don't use the snowball strategy because it's not cash-optimal.

However I do appreciate one major advantage it has over highest-rate first: reducing the number of bills you have to pay, bill quantity being a very annoying administrative and mental load that can eat up time and attention.

Certainly nobody says "wow, I wish I had a larger number of debt-collecting agencies I had to deal with each month."

With that in mind, it can make some sense to pay off small debts even if they are lower rate simply to avoid having to deal with their owners repeatedly over time.

This reminds me that I should finally revisit YNAB and re-open those browser tabs that explain how it works and integrate it into my life. (And transfer their US-centric approach to my European reality...) God damn it.

I love YNAB. Been using it for years. They just keep adding features & keep the web app nice and snappy.

Everybody says this, but it is just so unintuitive for me to get into.

I had forked a fork of this a while ago (unbury.us) -- I don't see any updates on the GitHub repo that links to that domain: https://github.com/duaneking/unburyme

The contact info is also quite vague now, where it previously linked to the creator's twitter and github.

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