What a Year with DebtRetired Looks Like
Years ago, when a friend worked at a company that charged families $6,000 for advice on how to get out of debt, I asked him one question. Who would pay that much to be told how to pay off their debt?
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “They do, and most of these concepts are new to them.”
The advice could be written on a napkin: pay off the highest-rate card first, then the next one, then the next. For most families, the various debt payoff strategies end up within a few months and a few thousand dollars of the best plan there is. Follow any one of them and you’ll do better than most of your neighbors.
The fee isn’t for the napkin, a spreadsheet, or any of the dozens of calculators on the Internet. The payoff order is relatively straightforward. Understanding why one strategy is better than another, which plans are not appropriate, knowing your own numbers, and staying on the plan for however many years it takes, that’s not as easy.
This post walks through what our fee gets you and what year one looks like. After seeing how much is here, you can decide if this experience and level of support is worth the investment.
The year at a glance
Free:
Run the Early Payoff Calculator. You’ll see how soon you could be debt-free and the interest you’d save.
Run the Cash Flow Calculator. Determine your true monthly surplus, your free cash flow.
Create a free account to unlock your exact payoff month and your full plan.
DIY from there, or book a free, no-obligation consultation: debt payoff basics, plus your actual numbers.
Paid:
Pay the one-time fee by credit card.
Onboarding call: review the options, choose and customize your plan.
Two monthly emails, one to confirm your numbers, and the other to show progress and offer a tip to go faster or save more.
Quarterly calls, an open door for quick questions, and an annual review.
FREE
Run your numbers
You’ve clicked the See Your Date button on our website. That button opens our Early Payoff Calculator. You start by entering your debts: each balance, rate, and required payment. That means the mortgage, the cars, the cards, the student loan, all of it, because the plan is only as good as the list. Then your take-home income. Then monthly living expenses, which is an estimate for everything else you spend in a month. Think groceries, electricity, car expenses, all of it. The calculator starts with that number as a guess, a percentage of your income, because it has to start somewhere. We’ll come back to this.
About two minutes later you’ll see a first estimate: how soon everything you owe could be paid off, and what you’d save in interest along the way, even if your income stays the same. The only difference is what you do with your free cash flow, what some people call discretionary income. It’s basically the money you have left over after your bills and normal spending. Now it is about aiming that surplus.
Steve and Amy’s first estimate. Yours will show your own numbers.
That savings figure compares a better plan to the current path you’re on, meaning your payments made on time, exactly as they show up on your statements, for as long as the schedule runs.
For the family you’ll meet in a moment, the current path ends in November 2053. The plan ends twenty-one years sooner, in September 2032.
That first screen is a headline. A free account shows you the rest: your exact payoff month, every account, and every milestone along the way. The account is an email address and a password. No credit card, and no credit pull.
A sample plan. Your screen will show your own date and figure.
Now, that free cash flow number, the one the calculator guessed as a percentage of income, is fine as an estimate, but it’s better to be accurate. No two families are alike. To say you spend 30-some percent of your total income on basic living expenses is just an estimate. A family earning $12,000 a month with two car payments and a kid in travel soccer does not spend what a different family will.
That is the reason we built and provide a free Cash Flow Calculator on this website: to replace the guess with a real number. Now you can enter your actual bills. And for the payments that aren’t monthly, no problem. You pick how often they’re paid and the calculator converts them to monthly for you. Car insurance and tuition are good examples.
Once you have a more accurate free cash flow (your monthly surplus), you put that number back into the Early Payoff Calculator and the date moves. This time it’s not based on a guess, it’s based on reality. Now, we all know today’s reality changes tomorrow, and the system is built for life’s changes.
Here is the part worth understanding before anything else in this post. The date moves because the free cash flow moved, not because the strategy changed. Free cash flow is what’s left after the bills, the living expenses, and the required payments. It’s the only lever any of this runs on. A family with $2,500 left over each month and a family with $3,600 can be sent to the same debts in the same order and finish years apart. The strategy decides the order. The surplus decides the speed.
That’s the end of the free part, and for some families it’s good enough. Now they know what’s possible. The plan looks right, the date looks real, and they’d rather DIY from there. That is fine, really. They can subscribe to our newsletter, our blog is here when you want to understand something better, and starting in January we’ll host a monthly podcast-style Office Hours on YouTube that is open for any question. Nobody will call you.
What follows is for the family that looked at the date and thought: I believe the math, I don’t trust myself to stay on it for six years.
The decision
If you’d rather not try to figure out which plan is best, or you’ve tried a couple of times over the years and doing it alone hasn’t stuck, you might benefit from walking with a guide, and that’s what we’re all about. An initial consultation is usually a thirty-minute Zoom or phone call where there’s nothing for you to prepare or bring.
Most of the call is spent on me walking through how debt actually works, and how the four moves (pay more, pay sooner, pay less interest, owe less) are the key to everything and how they show up in your plan.
The last part of the presentation is your actual numbers, on screen, with the strategies that fit your situation side by side. The point is that you understand what you’re looking at before you decide anything.
I’ll also tell you, on that call, whether I think I can help. Some families don’t need me. Their free cash flow is thin and the honest advice is to come back in a year, or their plan is so simple that paying for it would be silly. I’d rather say so on a free call than find out together after you’ve paid.
We don’t talk people into anything, ever. Whether it feels right is something only you can decide, and we only want to work with people who are tired of carrying debt and ready to retire the debt they’ve decided to retire.
If this looks different from anything you’ve seen before, and it leaves you feeling hopeful, the fee is $3,000, paid once, by credit card, before we start. It covers the whole first year, everything described below, and the planning platform your plan lives on. There’s no monthly charge and no card is kept on file.
By way of example, as you see in the graph above, Steve and Amy will have $5,052 a month that used to go to lenders available to save and invest when their plan finishes in September 2032. Our fee is less than one month of that.
Steve and Amy are a composite built from real client situations. Their numbers are real. Their names are not, because using a real family’s name here wouldn’t be right, and we’ll never do that.
PAID
Getting started
Onboarding is the first working session, and it’s where the plan stops being a calculator’s plan and becomes yours. We go through every number you put into the Early Payoff Calculator and tighten the ones that were guesses. We find the 0% promotion card that was entered at its regular interest rate. We decide what to do about the mortgage, which for some families means paying it down and for others means leaving a low fixed rate alone on purpose.
Our focus is on paying off the right debt, and we’ll talk about that. Zero debt, meaning everything gets paid off, is the right choice for some families and not others. That choice is yours, maybe with input from your financial advisor if you work with one. When that session ends you know how much you’re sending to each account, and why, starting next month.
The rhythm of the year
From onboarding to the annual review, the year adds up to six meetings, by Zoom or by phone; two emails a month, one with your updated numbers and one with a tip to go faster; and an open door by appointment for the quick questions that come up in between. Here is how each piece works.
Every month you’ll get two emails. The first one shows your updated numbers and the exact amount going to each account this month, and asks one thing: did anything change? If it did, you change it in your plan, not in a reply to me. A new balance, a rate that moved, a raise, a month where you need to send less or can send more: edit the number and everything downstream recalculates, the date included. Nobody has to re-key anything.
The second email shows the progress you’re making and the finish line approaching. It also shares a tip or a strategy idea, usually a way to find a little more free cash flow or shave a month off the date.
Most months the whole thing takes less than five minutes. If nothing’s changed, it’s one click of the I'll Make This Payment button.
A month inside a plan. Every account, every amount, one button.
Throughout the year, I am available. If something changed, new charges on a credit card, a raise, an inheritance, the co-signed loan finally got paid off, all you have to do is book a fifteen-minute meeting with me and we’ll look at it together. You don’t need an agenda, and if your question only takes four minutes, that’s fine too.
Every three months we reconnect for a scheduled quarterly call. We review where you started, what actually happened, and what the plan says now. We lead with what went right, because something always did, and a plan you’re proud of is a plan you stay on. If a quarter is going fine and you’re swamped, we can skip it. The door stays open either way.
At the end of the year we do the longer version: the year behind you, and whether anything about your life has changed enough that the plan should too.
Here’s the part notes on a napkin or a spreadsheet can’t do. The Early Payoff Calculator recalculates everything in seconds when you change any number. It can’t tell you whether the change matters, and it can’t notice the number you forgot to change.
The thing that keeps a plan alive is a guide who notices, asks, and decides with you whether the plan should change. Situations change all the time, and your plan has to change too, or what’s the point. Changing it is a number in a box, not a spreadsheet to rebuild.
Where this fits
A template fits a million families roughly. Some systems promoted on the Internet are so unnecessarily complicated that they don’t fit anyone for long. Ours fits one family, yours, and it keeps fitting as long as we tweak it slightly as life happens and things change.
If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, click See your date below and run your own numbers. It’s free, and the date you see is yours. If you honestly have no idea what your monthly surplus is, start with the Cash Flow Calculator in the menu at the top and come back with that number.
If you’d rather watch first or read more, subscribe to our newsletter, or join our monthly Office Hours on YouTube when it starts in January. Anyone can ask anything.
Our goal is to help a million families dramatically reduce their financial stress by getting on top of their debt and retiring the right debt faster. Along the way, they can put more attention on building wealth and enjoying life.