Understanding Your Results

When the Builder finishes, you land on Your Plans. Every plan on it is built from the same inputs, but each commits a different share of your surplus to paying off debt versus saving.

They aren't ranked best to worst. They're a spectrum, and picking from it is the real decision.

The plans

With room in your budget, you get five, from slowest payoff to fastest:

• ›Minimum Effort — pays each debt's own payment and saves the rest. The slowest payoff and the biggest cushion.
• ›Slightly Aggressive
• ›Aggressive
• ›Extremely Aggressive
• ›Maximum Effort — nearly all of the leftover goes to debt. The fastest payoff and the hardest to live with.

You'll see fewer when your situation doesn't support the full spread. When your debt payments already take up most of what's left each month, you get two — Minimum Effort and Aggressive. And when there's only one workable path, you get a single plan: The Only Way if you're carrying debt, or The Plan if you aren't.

Getting one plan isn't a failure state. It usually means your income and obligations leave little room to maneuver, so there's no meaningful choice to offer.

The recommendation

The first card on the screen is Recommended for you — the plan people with numbers like yours most often chose. It shows when that plan makes you debt-free, how much sooner that is than the slowest plan, and how much you'll have saved along the way. For The Plan, it shows what you'll have saved and by when.

Under WHY THIS ONE, up to two sentences compare your figures to those of people who chose the same plan. On Free the reasons are locked — you'll see Upgrade to see why. The reasons don't appear on every result; a single-plan result has no reasons, and neither does a recommendation made before there's enough data to compare against.

The recommendation, like every plan on this screen, is an estimate built from your inputs — not financial advice. BetterBudgets only knows the figures you entered, so for a decision specific to your situation, talk to a qualified professional.

The chart

Debt balance over time draws each plan's total balance year by year. The selected plan is highlighted; grey lines are the other plans, and dashed lines are plans that are locked. The chart doesn't appear when you have no debts.

The comparison table

Every plan gets a row, slowest first. Each row shows:

• ›how long the plan runs and, for every plan after the first, how much time it saves against the slowest one
• ›the month you're Debt-free (or when the plan Ends, for The Plan)
• ›how much you'll have Saved
• ›a Recommended badge on the recommended plan
• ›when an emergency fund goal is set, the month the plan reaches it — Fund by — or Fund not reached

If a plan runs out of paychecks with a balance still owed, its date reads Not cleared, and a note suggests rebuilding the budget to extend it.

Tap a row to select that plan.

The selected plan

Below the table, [plan name] at a glance shows tiles for the plan you've selected:

Debt-free — the date your debts are projected to be fully paid. It reads Ends on The Plan, and Still owing on for a plan that doesn't clear its balance.

Duration — how long the plan runs, in years and months.

Total saved — what you'll have saved by the end.

Time saved — how much sooner this plan finishes than the slowest plan in the set. The slowest plan reads Baseline. This is the number that makes the tradeoff concrete — it's the difference between aggressive sounds nice and aggressive is two years and four months.

Emergency fund — the date the plan reaches your goal, or Not reached. Only shown when you set a goal in the Income section. Faster payoff plans usually reach it later.

Tap Year-by-year breakdown to open a table of Year-End, Total Balance, and Total Savings. For plans with debt, a footnote explains that the budget lasts slightly longer than the final payoff date — the plan window extends a little past the last debt payment, so the duration and the debt-free date won't match exactly. That's expected.

The Maximum Effort warning

When Maximum Effort is selected, its card opens with a warning:

This plan allocates a large amount of available funds to repayment. Monthly savings will be minimal. Only choose this if you can sustain the financial pressure.

Starting it asks you to confirm a second time. Take both at face value. Maximum Effort is arithmetically optimal and, for most people, behaviorally the worst choice — it leaves almost nothing for savings, which means the first unexpected expense goes back onto a credit card and undoes months of progress.

The best plan is the most aggressive one you can hold for years, not the one with the earliest date.

Things to know

The Things to know card collects notes about this result: the average time an aggressive plan saves, why you're seeing this many plans, your emergency fund goal, any debt payment the Builder raised to cover interest, and notes about the selected plan.

What Free shows

Free unlocks Minimum Effort, The Only Way, and The Plan — so a single-plan result is fully open on Free, and in a two- or five-plan result Minimum Effort is the one you can start.

Locked plans still show their payoff date and savings in the table, with a lock beside the name, so you can see that a faster path exists and roughly what it's worth. Tapping one, or Unlock all [N] plans at the bottom of the screen, opens the upgrade screen. See What's Included with Thrive.

Choosing

Two questions, in this order:

1. ›Which of these could I actually live with for the full duration? Rule out anything that fails this, however good its date is.
2. ›Of what's left, which finishes soonest?

Most people should land a tier below their first instinct. There's no penalty for choosing a gentler plan and rebuilding more aggressively later once you've proved the routine sticks — but there's a real penalty for abandoning a plan in month three.

After you choose

The button at the bottom reads Start [plan name]. Tap it and the plan goes on Home, which switches to your first paycheck period with its bills listed. Your routine from here is short: open the app on payday, work down the bills, tick them off.

On Thrive you can switch to a different plan later from the Archive.

Continue to How Paycheck Budgeting Works, or see Editing & Rebuilding a Budget if your inputs need another pass.