The spreadsheet that user tossedAF describes, built by hand, line by line, because the free templates didn't match how their brain works, is exactly the kind of project that makes us optimistic about the future of personal finance tools. This is not a story about a broken formula. It is a story about a person who knows what they need and refuses to accept a one-size-fits-all solution.
TossedAF's approach reveals something important: debt tracking isn't a math problem. It's a design problem. The free trackers they tried probably worked fine for someone else, but they didn't account for how this user visualizes progress. That's why they built columns for item, total, payoff date, monthly payment, interest rate, and months left. That's why they wanted a second chart showing what balances will look in three months. They weren't asking for a formula that works in the abstract. They wanted a formula that works *for them*. The fact that ChatGPT's suggestion returned zeros across the board is frustrating, but it's also instructive: generic AI advice, even when well-intentioned, can't substitute for a tool that adapts to the way you actually think.
What struck us most is the user's admission that some of their debts carry zero interest. That detail matters. A snowball strategy built on intuition alone might treat all debts the same, but tossedAF is already thinking about the math beneath the method. They're trying to model not just the order of payments, but the real timeline, months remaining, not just dollars owed. That level of specificity is what transforms a tracker from a passive record into an active planning tool. The zeros in their results aren't a failure of effort; they're a signal that the formula needs to account for edge cases, like zero-interest accounts, that generic templates too often gloss over.
The takeaway here is practical. If you are building your own debt tracker, start with the logic that matches your own mental model. Write out what you want to see, balance today, balance in three months, payoff date, before you write a single formula. Test your interest calculations on a single row with known numbers before scaling up. And if a generated formula gives you zeros everywhere, step back and check whether it assumes every debt has a non-zero rate. The solution isn't to abandon your custom approach. It's to refine it, row by row, until the spreadsheet shows you the future you're working toward.