Every field explained, every screen described, and exactly how the three tools connect to each other. Nothing here is required reading, all three tools work fine if you just click around, but if you want the full picture before you start, it's below.
Map out every debt you're carrying, compare payoff strategies side by side, and get an exact payoff date instead of a guess.
Click "+ Add your first debt" (or just "Add a debt" once you have others). The form asks for:
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Name | Whatever you'll recognize it by. "Chase card," "Car loan," etc. |
| Type | Installment loan/mortgage, or revolving credit card. This changes which fields show up next. |
| Current balance | What you owe today. |
| APR | The interest rate. This is what avalanche ranks debts by. |
| Minimum payment | What you're required to pay each month. |
| Extra payment/month | Optional. A fixed amount above the minimum you already send to this specific debt, separate from the strategy slider below. |
| Credit limit | Optional, revolving only. Not used in payoff math, just there if you want it visible. |
The extra amount you set on an individual debt is separate from the extra-per-month slider in the Payoff Strategies panel below. The per-debt amount is money that's committed to that one debt no matter what. The slider models extra money you want to throw at debt overall, and that's what actually drives the avalanche/snowball comparison and the payoff schedule.
Toggle on "0% intro APR" when adding or editing a card, and three more fields appear: when the promo expires, how long the promo period is, and the standard APR it reverts to. There's also a choice for what happens at expiration: some cards charge interest retroactively on the whole promo balance (deferred interest) if anything's left, others just switch to the standard rate going forward. Getting this setting right matters, since the two behave very differently. Read the difference between 0% intro APR and deferred interest if you're not sure which your card does.
Real credit card minimums usually aren't a flat dollar amount, they're a percentage of your balance with a dollar floor, so the minimum shrinks as the balance does. Toggle on "Dynamic minimum" on a revolving card and set that percentage and floor to model it accurately instead of assuming a fixed payment for the life of the debt.
This isn't a setting you pick once. The Payoff Strategies panel calculates both at the same time from the same extra-per-month slider and shows them side by side: months to payoff and total interest for each, with the cheaper one flagged. Avalanche pays the highest-APR debt first (saves the most money). Snowball pays the smallest balance first (clears individual debts faster, which some people find easier to stick with). You can follow either one, the app doesn't lock you into anything.
Each debt in your list has actions to record a payment, add a one-off extra payment, view its schedule, edit its details, or delete it. As balances change, the charts (balance over time, principal vs. interest, and your payoff date) update automatically.
Export your Mint transaction data as CSV, then click "Import from Mint" in Debt Payoff. Mint's export only contains account names, not balances or rates (that data was never in a Mint export to begin with), so Downslope pulls in the account names and gives you a quick form to fill in the current balance, APR, and minimum payment for each one. It saves you from typing every account name by hand, the numbers themselves you still enter.
If you're coming from a spreadsheet rather than Mint, "Import CSV" reads a file with a header row of your own column names. At minimum you need name and balance columns; matching whatever other fields the Add-a-debt form has (type, APR, minimum, extra, promo settings, compounding) fills those in too. If you're unsure of the exact format, add one debt by hand first and use its fields as your column list.
What-if scenarios show how many months a raise, tax refund, or windfall would knock off your payoff date before you actually commit the money. Monthly cash flow tracks the "snowball rolling forward" effect, as each debt clears, its old minimum payment gets folded into what you can put toward the next one. There's also an AI-written payoff game plan in plain language based on your actual numbers.
Each debt has a compounding setting (monthly, daily, or semiannual) that affects exactly how interest accrues between payments. The default is fine for almost everyone; see About the Math for the full formulas if you want to check the numbers yourself.
Open Debt Payoff →Budgets by pay period instead of calendar month, so you always know what's actually available before your next paycheck lands.
The first thing Budget asks for is a short setup, three steps:
Every two weeks, every week, twice a month, once a month, or variable/freelance, plus one real recent or upcoming paycheck date to anchor the whole schedule.
What actually lands in your account per paycheck, not your gross salary, plus an optional label if you're adding more than one income source.
Shows your next paycheck date, an estimated monthly take-home, and flags any months where your pay cadence gives you three paychecks instead of two, the exact situation calendar-month budgeting tends to miss.
Add a category with a name and a planned amount, and optionally mark it Shared (split with someone else) or Essential, and group it under a label if you want related categories to sit together.
Receivables (free), a simple tracker for money owed to you: who, how much, when you lent it, and a note. Roommate/pod expense splitting (Pro), for managing shared recurring costs across a group of people rather than a single one-off loan.
Recurring bills log automatically once you've entered them, and Budget warns you mid-period if a category's spending pace is on track to run over before the period ends, rather than only telling you after it already has.
Budget has its own sync, separate from the Debt Payoff/Net Worth connection described below. Auto-sync generates a key, pushes your data, and checks for updates automatically every 30 seconds after that, useful if you use Budget on more than one device regularly. For a single one-time copy instead, "Send/Receive data via PIN" gives you a 6-digit code that expires in 15 minutes, no ongoing sync setup required.
Open Budget →Everything you own against everything you owe, in one view, with a trend line showing whether that gap is actually growing.
Two simple forms, no wizard:
| Add an asset | |
|---|---|
| Name, Value | What it's worth today |
| Category | Cash, Investments, Real estate, Vehicles, or Other |
| Add a liability | |
|---|---|
| Name, Value | What you currently owe |
| Category | Credit cards, Loans, Mortgage, or Other |
You can edit any asset or liability's name, value, or category in place afterward.
Tracks your net worth over time against a target trajectory you set, so you can see whether you're actually on pace rather than just checking the current total.
Net Worth's CSV format is its own, separate from Debt Payoff's. Each row needs a type column (asset or liability) along with name, value, and category. An unrecognized category doesn't fail the row, it just gets filed under "Other" with a warning so you can fix it after import. Importing replaces your manually-entered assets and liabilities, but anything synced in from Debt Payoff is preserved regardless of what's in the file, since that's Debt Payoff's data, not the spreadsheet's.
A monthly check-in that looks at your actual numbers and surfaces one thing worth doing next, rather than a generic list.
All three tools store your data locally, in your own browser, there's no shared account or server-side database tying them together. Connecting them works by sending a copy of your data over, on purpose, when you ask.
Debt Payoff's header has Budget and Net Worth buttons; Net Worth has a Debt Payoff button of its own. Clicking one sends your current data over and takes you straight to that tool with it already loaded.
Once it arrives, the two tools aren't watching each other continuously. Debt Payoff's debts show up in Net Worth as liabilities (defaulted to "Credit cards," recategorize freely) tagged as coming from Debt Payoff, and merge with, rather than overwrite, anything you've entered by hand.
After the first connection, each side remembers the link, so a "Refresh" or "Sync" button lets you pull the latest numbers over again whenever you want, on demand. If you'd recategorized a synced debt in Net Worth before, that choice sticks even after a refresh.
This is separate from Budget's own device-to-device sync described above, that one's about keeping Budget itself in sync across your own devices, not about connecting to Debt Payoff or Net Worth.
One $14.99 one-time purchase unlocks every Pro feature in all three tools, Debt Payoff, Budget, and Net Worth. There's no subscription and no per-tool charge.
You can start a purchase from inside any of the three tools, whichever Pro feature you click first will offer a "Buy Pro" button. After payment, your license key arrives by email.
Where you paste it looks a little different depending on the tool. In Debt Payoff, any Pro feature opens a dedicated screen with an "Apply Key" field. In Budget and Net Worth, a Pro feature shows as a blurred preview with an "Already have a key?" link that reveals the same kind of field. Either way, paste the key exactly as it arrived in your email and it unlocks Pro everywhere, not just in the tool you entered it in.
If a key doesn't arrive or doesn't work, reach out and it'll get sorted directly.
Still have a question this didn't answer?
Contact Dan directly