What is in the spreadsheet?
- Your debts: where you enter up to 10 debts, your extra monthly payment, the method and your first payment month. Your results and payoff order sit alongside.
- Payment plan: one row per month with what to pay each debt, the interest added and the balance left.
- Snowball workings and Avalanche workings: the month-by-month calculations behind the results. You never need to edit these.
How to fill it in
You need four things for each debt, all of which are on your latest statement or in your banking app:
- Balance: what you owe today.
- APR: the yearly interest rate, for example 24.9%. For an overdraft, use its yearly overdraft rate.
- Minimum payment: the least you have to pay each month. For an overdraft, enter what you plan to pay off.
- Extra each month: anything you can pay on top of all your minimums. This makes the biggest difference to your debt-free date.
The total you pay towards debt stays the same every month. When a debt is cleared, its payment moves to the next one in line, which is what makes the snowball grow. Letting payments fall back to the minimum instead can add decades: see what minimum payments really cost.
The built-in example
The spreadsheet opens with four example debts totalling £8,000, with £260 of minimum payments and an extra £150 a month. Here is the payoff order it shows with the snowball method:
| Debt | Balance | APR | Paid off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Store card | £400 | 29.9% | Month 3 |
| Overdraft | £900 | 39.9% | Month 7 |
| Credit card 1 | £2,400 | 24.9% | Month 16 |
| Credit card 2 | £4,300 | 21.9% | Month 25 |
- Snowball: debt-free in 25 months, with about £2,182 of interest.
- Avalanche: debt-free in 25 months, with about £2,161 of interest.
- Minimum payments only: 50 months and about £4,791 of interest.
Replace the example rows with your own debts and the results update straight away. The debt snowball calculator explains the method and this example in more detail.
Opening it in Google Sheets
- Download the spreadsheet.
- Go to Google Drive, choose New, then File upload, and pick the file.
- Double-click the uploaded file to open it in Google Sheets. You can edit it as it is, or choose File, then Save as Google Sheets to keep a Google Sheets copy.