Debt Tracker

The Debt tracker is where you record what you owe. Like Assets, it sits next to the budget — debt accounts are places, not categories. The tracker feeds the net-worth view and powers debt-payoff goals in the Lab.

Open it

Go to Debt in the main nav.

Your balance, debt-free date, and forecast

One card at the top of the Debt page covers all three: your total balance owed today, a chart of how it's moved, your Debt-Free Date — and, with Forecast turned on, where that chart is headed.

Total balance owed is shown with dollar amounts down the chart's left side and dates along the bottom. Hover any point for the exact balance on that day. Pick one of the same four ranges as the Assets chart — YTD, 1Y, 3Y, All — and the figure under the total updates to match, so switching to 3Y tells you what you paid down over three years. A falling line is the good outcome here, so it reads green and the figure says "paid down"; a rising balance reads red and says "added."

This history is built from the payments you've linked to each debt, not from a separate record of balances — so the more payments you link, the further back it reaches.

Part of that line may be dashed. A dashed stretch is estimated, not recorded: it covers payments made before the balance date you entered, so we work backwards from the balance you gave us. That works for a loan, where the payment is the only thing that moves the balance. It doesn't work for a credit card, where purchases push the balance the other way — a card you keep paying while still spending can look like it fell steadily when it never moved. So on a card, that stretch is drawn dashed to say "our best reconstruction", and the "paid down" figure ignores it entirely, measuring only from balances you actually recorded. If you want a solid line further back, update the balance regularly — each figure you record becomes a real point. Debts you've marked paid off aren't included: the app doesn't record when they were cleared, so counting them would invent a history that never happened.

Your Debt-Free Date is the month you'd clear every tracked debt if you keep paying the minimums, shown alongside your current principal (total owed today) and projected interest (what you'd pay in interest along the way). The estimate uses each debt's current balance, APR, and minimum payment, so you'll see a date as soon as every active debt has a minimum payment set — if one is missing, add it. If a minimum payment is too small to cover that debt's monthly interest, the balance would never fall, and the card says so instead of showing a date. It's an estimate from what you entered, not financial advice.

Forecast

Turn on Forecast and the balance chart keeps going past today — a dotted line runs out to your Debt-Free Date, so you see the path there, not just the destination.

With a few months of balance history, a second dotted line appears based on what you've actually been paying recently, not just the contractual minimums. If you've been putting extra toward a debt, the gap between the two lines is what that extra is buying you — a sooner debt-free date and less interest along the way. That second line needs at least three months of recorded payments to show up; with less history, only the at-minimum line is drawn.

That pace is measured from your loans only — the debts typed mortgage, auto, RV, student loan, or personal. A credit card's balance moves with new purchases as well as with payments, and BudgetLabs only ever sees the payments, so a card that's been sitting flat all year would look like one you'd been steadily clearing. Rather than promise you a debt-free date built on that, cards are left out of the measurement — along with HELOCs and lines of credit, which revolve the same way — and so is anything typed Other, which could be either. Setup now asks you for the type of each debt, so new accounts are counted correctly from the start. If a debt of yours is really a loan but is typed Other — anything added during setup before August 2026 started that way — open its Edit pencil and set the right type to have it counted. Debts you've already cleared don't count either. If nothing you track qualifies, you'll see the at-minimum line on its own. The extra we do measure is then applied across all your debts, highest APR first — so if you've been overpaying a loan, the forecast assumes you'd keep directing that same money at whatever you owe.

A mortgage needs its escrow amount filled in to be counted. Most mortgage payments bundle taxes and insurance in with principal and interest, and the minimum payment people enter is usually the P&I figure from their loan documents. Left to guess, BudgetLabs would read that escrow as extra principal every month and hand you a payoff date years too early — and there's no way to tell from the numbers alone whether a payment above the minimum is escrow or genuine overpayment. So a mortgage with no escrow recorded sits out of the pace measurement, and the card tells you which one to fix. Add it under Escrow / Fees on the debt account and the mortgage rejoins the calculation.

Forecast is a per-device setting, like the chart range — it starts off, and your choice sticks the next time you visit from the same device.

Add a debt account

Tap Add Account.
Pick a type: credit card, student loan, auto, mortgage, RV, personal, HELOC, line of credit, other.
Enter:
- Name (e.g., "Chase Sapphire") and lender.
- Original balance — the balance when you took it on (or when you started tracking).
- Current balance and valuation date.
- APR — the interest rate.
- Minimum payment and payment frequency.
- Due day of the month.
- Escrow amount — for mortgages with escrow.
Save.

Loan term

For fixed-term loans (mortgage, auto, student, personal), enter the original Loan Term (in years or months). BudgetLabs uses the original balance, APR, and term to compute the contractual monthly payment — and fills in the Minimum Payment for you if you leave it blank. Each debt card then shows the term, an estimated payoff date, and how much time is left (e.g. "2 yr 3 mo"). Revolving accounts like credit cards have no fixed term; just leave it blank.

Grouping and collapsing

Debt accounts are grouped by lender, and each group sits inside its own bordered panel tinted with that lender's colour, with a matching dot beside the group name — the same scheme the Assets page uses for institutions. Groups are ordered by outstanding balance, with anything missing a lender pinned to the bottom.

Tap the coloured dot to choose any colour you like, with a picker or a hex code. Lenders and institutions share one set of colours, so picking a colour for Chase here also changes it on Assets, and the other way round. Colours are saved to the budget, so they follow you between devices — unlike the collapse state above, which stays on the device you set it on.

Two levels of collapsing, both remembered on the device you're using:

A whole lender — tap the group header to fold every account under it.
A single account — tap the chevron on the card to fold it down to its name, type, lender, and estimated current balance (zero once it's paid off). The collapsed balances in a group still add up to the group's own total.

This is a viewing preference rather than budget data, so it stays on the device and won't follow you between phone and laptop.

Update a balance

Debts don't auto-sync. Update balances when you make a payment, or on a monthly cadence — whichever fits how you work. Open the account, change Current balance and Valuation date, save.

On mobile, opt into the monthly update reminder under Settings > Notifications.

Mark a debt paid off

When you hit zero, mark the debt paid off instead of deleting it. Open the debt's Edit pencil and switch on Paid off, then save.

Paid-off debts stop counting toward your active debt count, the total owed, and the debt-free projection — and they stop generating bills on the Bills page. They stay in the record, so the payment history and the historical net-worth chart are unaffected. Switch it back off any time.

Linking transactions

When you log a payment toward a debt, link the transaction to the matching debt account. Expand Show linked payments on the card to see every one, split into principal, interest, and escrow, with the running balance after each.

Fastest way in: from the debt card itself. With Show linked payments expanded, tap + Add transaction — it opens the same transaction form, already linked to that debt account. Each payment row also carries edit and delete buttons, so a wrong amount or a duplicate can be fixed without going back to the Transactions page.

Only the principal reduces the balance — interest and escrow leave your account but don't pay the loan down. On a loan with an APR, each payment is charged one month of interest; on a credit card, interest accrues over the days since the last activity. If your lender publishes the exact split, put it in the transaction description (Interest Amount: 330.81 Escrow Amount: 997.96) and BudgetLabs will use those figures instead of estimating. Recording an extra principal-only payment? Write Interest: 0 in the description so none of it is treated as interest.

Interest is paid first, and a short payment doesn't touch principal. This is how most servicers work: if $100 of interest is due and you pay $50, the whole $50 goes to interest and the balance doesn't move. The payment row shows $50.00 interest unpaid so you can see why. That $50 carries to your next payment and is settled before any principal — so a run of short payments tracks your statement instead of quietly showing progress you haven't made. On a credit card the same unpaid interest rolls into the accruing balance.

Payments dated before your recorded valuation date are already baked into the balance you entered, so they're shown for history (marked with a *) but don't reduce it a second time.

One payment, several loans

Pay several loans at the same servicer with a single debit? Tap Allocate to loans on the transaction form instead of picking one account. Add a row per loan, enter what went to each, and a running tally shows how much of the payment is placed — Save is blocked until the rows add up to the exact transaction amount, so nothing can be entered halfway and forgotten. Each row becomes its own payment on its own loan, so every loan accrues and pays down at its own APR instead of just the one you'd normally pick. On the Transactions list, a sliced row carries a "× N loans" chip instead of the usual single account name; opening it again shows the same rows so you can adjust them.

Split a Loan Payment walks through it with a short video, including taking the money out of a checking account at the same time.

This is separate from splitting a transaction across budget categories (see Transactions) — a payment can be sliced across loans and split across categories at the same time, since they answer different questions ("which loans got paid" vs. "which budget line pays for it").

If a loan on your account was previously only ever paid through a payment linked to a different loan, its balance may not have moved in a while — see the note below.

A previously-frozen balance may look like it jumped. Before this, a loan with no transaction ever linked to it directly did not accrue or pay down at all — it just held at whatever balance you last entered. If you start slicing payments across loans that were sitting like that, expect their balances to start moving for the first time, and your total balance owed may go up relative to what it showed before. That is the correction landing, not a new debt — those loans were quietly never being counted.

Credit cards: purchases and payments

Credit cards (and HELOCs / lines of credit) track two directions of activity:

Payments — linked with the existing Linked Debt Account field (or a category default). A payment lowers the card's balance.
Purchases — linked with the Paid With Card field on the transaction form. A purchase stays in its own budget category (Groceries stays Groceries) but also raises that card's estimated balance, so the Debt Tracker mirrors what your card issuer shows: Statement Balance (the figure you entered) plus new charges, minus payments, equals the estimated current balance.

Open a card and choose Show activity to see both lists — Linked Payments and Linked Transactions. Purchases dated before your recorded balance date are marked *: they're already part of the balance you entered, so they don't raise it again.

Both lists carry a Balance After column, so you can follow how the card got to where it is one row at a time rather than trusting a single total. Reading the Linked Transactions list from the top down walks backwards in time: the newest row shows today's estimated balance, and each row below it is the balance before the purchase above was made. The newest figure always equals your recorded balance plus the "+$X since your recorded balance" total in the list's header — two views of the same arithmetic, so if they ever disagree, something is wrong.

Rows below the recorded-balance date show their Balance After in grey. Those are reconstructed — worked backwards from the balance you entered rather than built forwards from it — which is why they carry the * as well.

Record a payment (credit cards)

Paying a credit card is a money move, not new spending — the cash leaves your checking account and the card's balance drops by the same amount. Credit-card accounts have a Record a payment button for exactly this, sitting first in the card's action row next to Add transaction and Add bill reminder.

It opens a short, category-free form — three fields, plus a fourth when the card has a bill reminder scheduled against it:

Amount — how much you paid.
Date — when you paid it.
Paid from — the checking or savings account the money came out of.
Bill reminder — the reminder this payment goes toward. Shown only when the card has an unpaid reminder; if there's exactly one, it's picked for you and its amount fills the Amount box. Choose None to record a payment that isn't against a reminder.

Save, and both sides move in one step: the card's balance falls and the source account's balance falls with it.

Choosing a reminder links the payment to it, and marks the reminder paid once the payment covers its amount. A partial payment stays linked and leaves the reminder open — its Payments panel on the Bills page shows how much is covered so far. Delete the payment later and a reminder it alone had settled goes back to unpaid.

Order doesn't matter. If you record the payment first and mark the reminder paid afterwards, the mark-paid dialog offers that payment to link. Either way the card counts the money once — a reminder marked paid and a payment recorded separately used to show up as two payments on the card. There's no budget category to pick and nothing to invent, because a card payment isn't an expense — the purchases you made on the card are already tracked one by one. The payment is filed under a reserved, excluded category, so it never double-counts against those purchases or touches your Income − Expenses total. That category doesn't appear in the Budget Breakdown; the payment shows on the card and on the Transactions page.

Before this, paying a card meant opening the full transaction form and making up an expense category to file it under. This is the front door regular credit cards were missing.

For now it's credit cards only. Loan and mortgage payments are real spending that belongs in a budget category, so those still go through the transaction form (see Linking transactions above).

I pay this card in full

If you clear a credit card's statement every month, edit the card on the Debt page and turn on I pay this in full. Three things change:

Cash Coverage on the Cash Flow page sets aside the card's whole balance on its due date instead of its minimum payment, and grades it simply covered or short — "minimums only" isn't a state for someone who never pays the minimum. It uses the balance the Debt page shows (your statement balance plus every purchase you've tagged to the card since, minus payments), not just the statement figure you typed.
The Dashboard shows Keep back for cards: the total those cards are owed, with a per-card breakdown. It's information, not a budget line — those purchases already sit in their own categories, so it isn't added to your plan balance.
No interest is estimated on the card. Someone who pays the statement in full is never charged interest, so the Debt page no longer takes a slice of each payment for it — a $500 payment on a $500 balance leaves $0, not a few dollars that grow every month. If your issuer does charge interest one month, put it in the payment's description (Interest: 12.34) and that exact figure is used.

The switch only appears on revolving accounts (credit cards). Loans keep their minimum-payment behaviour.

Net worth

Total debt is summed and subtracted from total assets in the Lab's Net worth view. As you pay debt down, the gap closes — that's the chart you want to see climbing.

Goals

Set a debt-payoff goal to track a specific debt against a target date — e.g., "Chase Sapphire to $0 by December 1." The goal opens to a live trajectory chart with what-if sliders for monthly contribution and target horizon. See Lab — Goals.

Mortgages and escrow

Mortgages have a couple of quirks:

The principal balance is what counts toward net worth — not the full payment.
Escrow (taxes and insurance) goes out, but it's a budget category, not a debt reduction.

Track the principal in the Debt tracker; track escrow as a recurring expense category in the budget.

Assets and savings — what you own.
Lab — Goals — for debt-payoff goals on top of these accounts.
Hank — ask "list my debts" and Hank will summarize them.