My Favorite Student Loan Calculator

This is going to be a short post, but it should help a lot of people.

Since I’m a finance nerd and think about debt payoff and investing a lot, financial calculators take up a lot of my time.  While there are a lot of good investing calculators out there, I could never find a nice debt payoff calculator.  Here’s what I look for in a good debt calculator:

-The ability to enter multiple loans with different interest rates.  This is really helpful for people with student loans.  Sadly, most calculators don’t even have this seemingly basic feature.

-A graphic representation of my current loans and when they will be paid off.

-The ability to see the effect of increasing or decreasing your extra loan payment on your loan payoff date.

Ready For Zero had a program that did exactly this, and it was great!  I used it for a few years until they suddenly stopped offering it this year.  Huge bummer.

I searched futilely for a similar calculator with no luck.  Recently, I tried to search for a calculator again and an old friend resurfaced…

Unbury.me

I wrote about unbury.me a few years back because the calculator had everything I wanted.  It even showed how much more time and money you’d save by using a debt avalanche instead of a snowball!  It was a very no frills and basic looking calculator but it got the job done.

Like Ready For Zero, it mysteriously disappeared.  But now it’s back with a nice updated look.  Here is a look at the home page:

Everything I want is right there on the home page looking all simple and clean.  From here you can add as many loans as you want and enter the balance, interest rate and monthly payment.  And you can select if you want to pay them off using the avalanche (highest interest loan first) or snowball (lowest balance loan first) method.

Once you enter your information, you’ll be redirected to a cool dashboard with a lot of nice colorful looking graphs.  It’s a nice little control center that gives you a ton of good information.

But the best part is the top of the dashboard which looks like this:

All the information I need in a nice little toolbar.  I love being able to see the exact month my loans will be gone (less than 2 years!)

There are a lot of other cool graphs and numbers to play with.  Number junkies like myself will spend a lot of time on this site.

Having a good student loan calculator like this can be a very motivating factor in paying off your loans quickly.  It’s great seeing the exact month you will be debt free and the powerful effect of paying more on your highest interest loan.

I recommend setting aside a nice half hour to enter all of your student loans and looking at all the nice graphs they have on here.  Another feature is that you can create a profile and save all of your info.  Saves having to re-enter all of your loans again.  Unbury.me is simply an awesome student loan calculator.  Enjoy!

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Comments

  1. Natasha says

    Thank you for this helpful tool! I honestly didn’t even know these things existed. Looking forward to using it 🙂

    • Syed says

      You’re welcome yeah it’s a great tool. Knowing exactly when you can be debt free is a powerful thing.

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