How to Create a Debt Snowball Spreadsheet

Personal finance has always been an interest of mine - not because I'm good with money, but probably more of the opposite. 😬

The term "debt snowball" was probably most popularized by Dave Ramsey. Put simply, it is a method paying down your debts from the lowest balance to the highest balance. Once one debt is paid, you put the payments you were making on that debt towards the next debt, thus excellerating the paydown of each debt.

I've written my own budgeting software and added debt snowball type tools to them. I've tried other debt snowball tools as well. Many out there will show you what could happen if you follow the plan. But life doesn't really follow the plan we always lay out.

Therefore, I wanted more of a living debt snowball where I can see where I could have things paid off if I followed the plan, and also track what actually happened.

So I decided to just create a google spreadsheet to track everything. It has worked quite well.

Over a year ago, I decided to create a video tutorial to help some people who had asked about it. I posted on YouTube. I noticed that I started getting a lot of comments thanking me. As of this writing I have nearly 16K views - which has to be the most views I have on a video (though I don't produce a lot of YouTube content).

If you are interested in created a living debt snowball to track you debt paydown, check out my video tutorial: