Understanding Your Results

When the Builder finishes, you land on Results — a stack of cards, each one a complete plan built from the same inputs but committing a different share of your surplus to debt payoff.

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

The plans

A typical result gives you five, listed longest-running first:

›Minimum Effort — the gentlest. Longest timeline, most breathing room.
›Slightly Aggressive
›Aggressive
›Extremely Aggressive
›Maximum Effort — the fastest payoff and the hardest to live with.

You'll see fewer when your situation doesn't support the full spread. A narrower surplus might produce 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.

Reading a card

Collapsed, each card shows the plan's name and a single line: how much you'll have saved, and the date you'll have saved it by.

Tap to expand it:

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

Est. Zero Balance Date — when your debts are projected to be fully paid. Not shown on The Plan, since that result appears when you have no debts to clear.

Time Savings — how much sooner this plan finishes compared to the longest plan in the set. The top card is the baseline, so it doesn't show one; every card below it is measured against it. 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.

The T-chart — the money flow for the plan, showing what goes where.

Plans other than The Plan carry a footnote: 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 zero-balance date won't match exactly. That's expected.

The Maximum Effort warning

Maximum Effort displays a warning before anything else:

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.

Take it 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.

The recommendation

Below the plans is a Recommendation, including what people in comparable situations chose. It's a useful sanity check when you're torn between two adjacent tiers.

On the Free plan the recommendation shows but the reasoning behind it is locked — you'll see Upgrade to see why.

What Free shows

Free unlocks one plan. In a five-plan result that's Minimum Effort; in a single-plan result it's whichever one you got, so Free users with only one path see everything.

Locked plans still show their name and headline numbers, so you can see that a faster path exists and roughly what it's worth. Opening one requires Thrive. See What's Included with Thrive.

Notes

Your notes from the General section appear on this screen, which is more useful than it sounds — the assumptions you wrote down are right there while you're choosing.

Choosing

Two questions, in this order:

›Which of these could I actually live with for the full duration? Rule out anything that fails this, however good its date is.
›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 budget becomes active and the home screen 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, mark them complete.

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