Tested on: iPod Touch 4G (iOS 4.3.1) Rating: 4 of 5
Debt Snowball Pro is an application that will help you to simulate how you could manage and eliminate your debts using the "Debt Snowball" method that is taught and endorsed by many financial advisors. The application allows you to enter in every debts that you may have, along with their detail information, such as annual interest rate and minimum monthly payment. Then, on top of it, you can enter in your additional money that you would want to put in (as the snowball) to help speed up the debt payments. With three different simulations you can choose which method suits you best.
I have to be honest and say, at first, I don't understand what Debt Snowball method is. But after a quick study on the Wikipedia, I learn that it's a very good method to help you manage and eliminate multiple debts. This application is very successful in illustrating the different snowball alternatives and surprisingly quite easy to use. All you need to do is enter in your debts in the first tab, and then select which method you'll like to simulate on the second tab. Immediately you'll see when you'll be debt free from all of your debts and how many interest you've saved using the selected method. I think there may have been some bugs related to the amount of interest you've saved, because after many attempts selecting different snowball methods I don't see any changes in the amount of savings I make.
The application also allows you to set up password to protect your data/simulation and send an e-mail with your Snowball simulation. The problem that I encountered is that I don't see the impact of setting the password on your data. I've tried to set the password, but it seems I can still access them easily. And the e-mail feature turns the nicely table-formatted data into a text-based comma separated information. I assume that the developer expects the users to turn that into an Excel or Number document by themselves. Another thing that I can suggest as a possible improvement in the future is to create a graphical representation to help illustrate the snowball effect, in addition to the current table display. Since the total amount of money that have to be paid are constant throughout the period, it would be great to see how that money is being allocated differently throughout the period.
Check out the following video presentation from the developer on YouTube.
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