Mint’s New Goal Helps You Pay Down Student, Auto and Personal Loans

Since we launched the Goals feature last summer, our users have created over a million goals. Most popular has bean the “Pay Off Debt” goal: not surprising considering that when you are loaded down with debt already, it’s probably not the best time to be thinking about purchasing a new iPad or saving for a new car or exotic trip.

We have now updated the feature to make it even easier to create a debt-reduction plan for credit cards and, for the first time, student loan debt.

Getting out of debt can seem intimidating, so one new feature we introduced to the “Pay Off Credit Card Debt” and the “Pay Off Loans” goals is breaking the set-up process down, so that users get a detailed payment plan in addition to a series of action steps, each of which bring you closer to achieving your goal.

The new features of Mint.com’s step-by-step Debt goals allow users to:

•          Break down debt: Create separate goals by debt type: credit cards or loans.

•          Create a payment plan: See how changing monthly payment affects interest paid, money saved and when the debt will be paid off.

•          Take a comprehensive look at debt: Create a 6-month payment plan detailing monthly payments for each debt.

•          Develop an action plan: Take steps to find the best and fastest way to get out of debt and optimize savings.

In addition to providing a step-by-step guide to help people easily determine how much money they’ll need to achieve their ultimate goal, Mint.com also offers educational tools that can be applied to all aspects of personal finance from budgeting to long-term planning.

Further tips and advice are provided through Mint Answers and Mint’s Drop Your Debt Challenge that pits 10 city teams against one another to see which city can most improve its debt-to-savings ratio.