Can Usability Pay off your Mortgage, part 2

So it’s been a while since my post on usability helping to pay off your mortgage, and I thought I should give you a little update. I signed up for the money merge account with United First Financial a little over a week ago, and got my welcome e-mail last week, right in the middle of a very hectic week. I didn’t have time to sit down and “play” with it until yesterday, when I finally watched their training video (… they insisted I watch the training before I “touched anything”, so I did) and set up everything. I even scheduled a few bills with my online billpay so I could feel like I actually got started on our plan.

I am almost unsure I really believe that we’ll really have our mortgage paid off that fast. 3.67 years, it says, if I set the “aggressive scale” to 1, which is the lowest, most conservative setting. Did I miss something in our expense list? No, I entered everything I had in the budget, didn’t I? … but did I think of everything? Did I really include all our expenses?

To help in that matter, a couple things it would be nice to have is:

• A more interactive training video or perhaps a setup wizard instead
  • They are right–it’s not entirely intuitive to find everything you need to get started without watching a training video. But the training video is entirely passive–you just sit and watch someone do loads of things in a video and then you’re on your own. Sure, you can watch the video again, but it’s difficult to tell where the part that answers your question is in the video. If the training were more interactive, showing you how to do a piece and then giving you the opportunity to do that step, it might be more effective. To give them credit, they also offer in-person training, but I didn’t really want to go through (and wait for) a hand-holding session.
• Some way of reminding you of expenses you may have missed
  • Some automatic categories of expenses, perhaps, rather than making me enter all my own categories? I might not like your categories, but why not just have a sample set to start with? If I don’t like them, I could delete them, but at least they would serve as reminders of potential areas of expense I hadn’t taken into account.
• Use user-oriented language in the training video. It appeared to me that they got one of the engineers who built the software to do the training video–I caught some programmer words like “environment” in the training video–normal people don’t use those kinds of words.

Other little things that would help with usability:

• Instead of showing a dashlet at the top that tells me “Interest remaining”, how about “Interest saved”? I want to know just how much I’m saving with this $3,500 piece of software. That’s the most I’ve ever paid for a piece of software in my life!
• When I entered my credit card accounts in, I didn’t know what the balance was (because I pay them off every month, so I really don’t think of it as “having a balance”), so I started with a $0.00 balance. Once I found the credit card statements, I wanted to go in and edit the balance, but it wouldn’t let me! That was a little frustrating. I had to delete the account entirely, then enter them again.
• A way of recommending better ways to pay. If it would help me pay off my mortgage faster to use my credit card for certain payments, I would like to know that, but all the expenses I entered in asked me to specify how I wanted to pay. Absolutely, I want to control that, but how about a button that makes a suggestion on best way to pay?

All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with the software and hopeful that it will really work to get our mortgage paid off faster.

Can usability help pay off your mortgage?

Many of us muddle through our finances–we go to work, get paid, buy groceries and other things and we pay our bills. If there’s anything left over, it often goes toward something frivolous or maybe we might pay off a little of our debt with it. Most of the time we don’t stop and think about where we’re at, where we’d like to be, or how to get there financially. Those of us that make an attempt at a financial goal like being debt-free often tackle it without a clear plan. That’s like going on a roadtrip without a map (or GPS unit)–you’re likely to get lost somewhere along the way.

Personally, I want to be completely debt-free. Last year we moved out of our spendy home in the country into a more affordable one in the outskirts of the city, paid off our car loans and my husband’s student loan, and we had enough “extra” to make life in our new home here pretty comfortable. The only debt we’ve got left to tackle now is the mortgage, and I’ve been hacking away at that by making a couple extra payments when we have a little extra left at the end of the month, but without any clear plan or sense of how much progress we’ve made or how much longer we’ll be paying on this house.

Then I ran across the Money Merge Account from United First Financial and it intrigued me–people were using this software program to pay off their mortgage in 1/3 to 1/2 the time. I talked to Joanne, the sales lady who’d invited me to one of their presentations, and she said she’d paid off her mortgage in 15 months. I was curious to see this software in action–what is it that makes it so good? 

So last week Joanne give me a demo of their software and I have to say say, as a usability practitioner, I’m impressed. From what I’d read about it, the software actually calculates the time value of money and determines the right time to put extra money into the mortgage. The calculations are quite complex, but they’ve hidden all that complexity behind the scenes and made it so simple to see where you’re at, how long it will take you, and how to get there.

Like a speedometer in your car, the measures of where you’re at, how soon you’re going to get there and how much it’s going to cost you are shown in three windows right at the top:

1. Payoff date
2. Years to payoff
3. Interest remaining

The way it works is you feed your monthly budget and income sources into the software. The Money Merge Account software then shows you a rolling 90-day action plan. As you go through and implement that plan (adding or subtracting any deviations along the way), the actual income and expenditures show up in the Money Merge Account tab and the mortgage-ometers change appropriately.

If you have an expense coming up that doesn’t fit in your monthly budget, you simply enter that into the plan. There’s a handy button there too–you can click the “Best time to buy” button and the software will actually calculate the best date within this window, financially speaking, for you to make that purchase. You can override that best time if you need that item sooner.

Another tool I thought was great is the “True cost” switch. If you turn this switch on, you’ll see what any extra expenditure (in terms of extra interest you have to pay on your mortgage) will REALLY cost you. Joanne tells me some people don’t want to know that, but for me, I’d love to see how any extra purchase is going to affect the goal.

The only problem is I wasn’t the one using the software in the demo. Joanne stepped through it all–perhaps it won’t be as easy when I am the driver, but it appears very usable. The buttons are big and clearly labelled, with icons to help users understand what each button does. The bulk of the action happens in 3 main tabs:

1. Action Plan: that’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s the listing of what you expect your income and expenses are going to be.
2. Money Merge Account: this tab isn’t named very intuitively, but once you understand what it is, it’s fairly easy. This is the tab that shows the actions you’ve completed (your expenditures and paychecks).
3. Cashflow: this is the tab you use to enter in changes to your cashflow. This is where you put in those extra expenditures (or windfalls, such as a tax return).

The software costs $3,500.00–some people might think that’s a lot, but considering what you’ll save in mortgage interest, it’s really a good deal. Joanne tells me with the budget I gave her (a conservative estimate), we can pay off our mortgage in 4.25 years and save about $37,000 in interest.

What I’m really excited about is that mortgage-ometer. It seems to me that if we keep our goals visually in front of us, we can’t help but win. If only they’d put them (along with any pending action alerts) in a gadget for my iGoogle homepage or my Windows Sidebar. There’s an idea for you, United First Financial!

Oh, another couple suggestions I have for United First Financial. On your web site:

1. Lose the cheesy music on the homepage. It is annoying!
2. Include a video demo of the software somewhere on the site. You’ve got usable software; don’t be afraid to show it! You could save your salespeople a lot of time, as well.
3. Consider offering a signup for a free trial period. The trial doesn’t have to be very long–perhaps 15 days–just long enough for someone to see if the software would really help them.

I haven’t purchased the software yet, but have already sent Joanne our budget. My husband thinks it’s a good idea, so long as I put some tile floors in our spend plan sometime this year.

Would you like to hear progress reports from our mortgage-ometers?