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ReadyForZero Helps You Decimate Your Debt

22.05.12

If you are one of the 181 million Americans with a belief card who owns a chunk of the $929 billion of outstanding debt (according to the 2010 U.S. Census), time can very limiting. And if you have a low credit score, buying a home, renting a bigger apartment, or buying a crap-shooter car can all seem like a distant dream. Getting out of debt can be a Herculean task; but it moral got easier, thanks to two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who took their familiar experience with debt and turned it into an innovative software program to get you back in the black.

ReadyForZero.com is an online program that helps you put your in hock into perspective and pay it down. Although its personal finance focus may muster comparisons with Mint.com, there are some superior distinctions, according RFZ’s creators, Rod Ebrahimi and Ignacio Thayer. ReadyForZero’s sharply defined unclear is solely to help you pay down debt, and it “won’t offer you other credit cards,” Ebrahimi says.

“When you’re in accountable, that should be your focus,” he adds, “not adding more debt to your situation.”

Teaming Up

Through a reciprocal friend, Ebrahimi met Ignacio Thayer, then a software engineer for Google Investigation. After a few conversations, the two knew they wanted to work together, but didn’t have the right lob—until Thayer began to tell Ebrahimi about his girlfriend’s woes managing her learner loan debt. This struck a chord with Ebrahimi and his own debt situation.

With neither having a out of the public eye in finance, they met with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to get their bearings. With Thayer’s savoir faire finding innovative ways to manage and crunch data and Ebrahimi’s entrepreneurial energy and HCI (human-computer interface) expertise, they charged forward with their idea. To test the beta form of RFZ, they initially posted an open call on craigslist for people to be financial guinea pigs. But in the end, Thayer says they gleaned more valuable knowledge by simply asking their friends to sign up and try the software.

Once the basic parameters of the program and its interface were established, Thayer and Ebrahimi still needed start-up funds. Rather than go into answerable for, the two entered ReadyForZero into Y Combinator, a California-based competition for tech start-ups to collect seed money through venture capitalists. Thusfar, ReadyForZero has raised more than $4 million from plunge capital firms including Polaris Venture Partners and Citi Ventures. To crowd the site, Ebrahimi and Thayer chose Amazon Web Services, which still satisfies their insurance and bandwidth needs.

How It Works To use ReadyForZero, you enter the information of the account(s) you pine for to pay down. It finds the account and calculates how long it will take to pay it off, as well as what your final payoff amount will be—often a very sobering tons. Once you know what you’re up against, you then devise a plan to pay it down faster by finding out how much you can possibly donate. Instead of entering an arbitrary number in a fill-in box, RFZ includes two cool slider tools: one to father or lower the monthly payment and another to show the time needed to pay off the balance. The calculations are done automatically. And for complimentary reinforcement, the numbers are broken down into digestible pieces. For example, instead of beating you over the brains with that one big balance in red, it shows you how much your debt is costing you each day and how much you’ve saved by paying a larger amount each month.

To further the decisive reinforcement, Ebrahimi and Thayer have built in social features. On the RFZ blog are ascendancy stories and discussions of current issues related to debt, such as forgiving undergraduate loans. And if you choose, you can share your financial progress with other registered users—without divulging any definitive account info, or even your name. Thayer and Ebrahimi are also working in the functionality to share your observations with financial institutions, the idea being that they can then bid against each other to offer you more favorable rates on your debt.

Another key component of the ReadyForZero interface and a key differentiator from Bundle, says Ebrahimi, is that RFZ is “extremely opinionated.” It does not step you a myriad of options for paying down your debt, but instead recommends a very specific advance of action to eliminate your balance. Also, when you make a large deposit in your checking account, RFZ will propound using some of it to increase your payment.

Source: PC Magazine