A Debt Payoff goal is for clients who want a plan to get out of debt — credit cards, student loans, autos, HELOCs, mortgages, anything carrying a balance and a rate. It's the fourth goal type in Kerdora, alongside Retirement, Education, and Liquidity.
Unlike the other goals, Debt Payoff doesn't have a savings target. You're not accumulating a pile of money; you're choosing liabilities, picking a strategy, and solving for either a payoff date or a monthly budget.
Where to find it
Go to Planning > Goals inside the client. Click + Add Goal and pick Debt Payoff. Give it a name (something like "Credit cards" or "All consumer debt") and save. The goal card opens up with the calculator.
Assigning debts
The first step after creating the goal is telling Kerdora which liabilities it covers. In the goal's Account Assignment section (same place you assign accounts to Retirement or Education goals), pick the liabilities from the client's balance sheet you want to include.
Each assigned liability pulls its balance, interest rate, current payment, and minimum payment from the Accounts tab. You can override any of those four fields inside the calculator if you want to run a "what if" scenario without changing the underlying data.
Solving for a date or a payment
Two knobs drive the calculator:
Solve for. Choose Months (give a target date, Kerdora tells you the extra monthly payment needed) or Payment (give a monthly budget, Kerdora tells you when you'll be debt-free).
Strategy. Choose Avalanche (highest interest rate first — saves the most money) or Snowball (smallest balance first — builds momentum with quick wins).
The calculator runs the math across every assigned debt, respecting each debt's minimum payment, and applies any extra above the minimums according to the strategy.
Reading the results
Once assignments and settings are in, the goal card shows:
Total debt. Sum of balances across all assigned debts.
Payoff date or Monthly payment needed, depending on which one you're solving for.
Total interest paid over the life of the plan.
Per-debt summary. Each debt's individual payoff month, total interest, and how the strategy ordered it.
The payoff summary updates as you tweak overrides, change the strategy, or move assignments.
Avalanche vs. snowball — when to pick which
Avalanche is mathematically optimal. If the client is disciplined and motivated by the number, use it.
Snowball is behaviorally optimal for clients who've tried and stalled before. Paying off the smallest balance first creates a visible win, which keeps them going.
The calculator shows the total interest difference between the two strategies, so you can quantify what the behavioral choice is costing.
Overrides — when to use them
Per-debt overrides are handy when:
The balance-sheet balance is stale and the client just gave you a fresher number in the meeting.
You want to model a consolidation: temporarily set one debt to zero and add the consolidated balance to another.
The client wants to see "what if we cut our payment by $200 to do other things" — override current payment and re-solve.
Overrides stay on the goal; they don't change the Accounts tab. Clear the override to go back to the live balance-sheet value.
Tips
One goal per bucket is fine. You can have "Consumer debt" and "Mortgage" as two separate Debt Payoff goals with different strategies and target dates. Mortgages paired with high-interest cards muddle the avalanche math.
Liquidity first, then payoff. The Observations engine will flag "high-interest debt with surplus cash" when the client has idle cash above a threshold while carrying pricey debt. Generally keep an emergency fund intact before attacking debt aggressively, but that's a client-by-client call.
Pair with a Change to Be Made. "Pay an extra $400/month toward the credit cards" belongs on the Changes to be made page so the client has a concrete action item, not just a calculation.