Streamline Your Debt

Streamline Your Debt is a free tool that analyzes your home mortgage and shows you ways to reduce your payments or pay your loan off more quickly by using a Home Equity Line of Credit. While it's not the most intuitive tool we've used, its summaries offer useful data that can help guide your decisions.

We extracted the compressed download and clicked the executable file. Streamline Your Debt's simple interface opened with a tabbed Startup Wizard that let us enter home, HELOC, and income and expense data. We entered data for House Value, Loan Value, Interest Rate, Loan Length (in years), and First Mortgage Payment Date, selected whether to optimize for less interest or fewer months, and clicked Optimize. Green progress bars displayed the program's activity. After a brief time, a Summary page appeared with a considerable amount of useful data claiming we could save X dollars or months. Clicking a button labeled Payment Dates produced a spreadsheetlike payment schedule. We closed out the summary and the worksheet and found we needed to click the Edit menu and then Startup Wizard to start a new worksheet; we would prefer a New or Add button to initiate a new calculation. The Advanced configurations let us enter various ratio and balance settings. A button labeled Alternative Ways To Accelerate offered data and Amortization Tables for Acceleration without HELOC and a Bi-Weekly Program.

Streamline Your Debt is free, but we needed a registration code to unlock the Mortgage and HELOC tables as well as the Input Monthly Data tool. We had to provide a name and e-mail address to register. Although the process was quick and easy, we're not exactly happy about having to register to access all the features of a supposedly free tool, which seems like an invitation to spammers. But for homeowners and property owners wondering if a HELOC can help, Streamline Your Debt is a useful tool.