PayoffPath explains how consumer debt works in the United States: what it costs, what your options actually do, and where each one stops working. It is a publication — not a lender, a law firm, a credit repair company or a debt relief company. Nothing here is sold to you.
What we do
We answer the questions people actually type into Google about debt, and we answer them with the arithmetic visible.
That last part is the whole point. Almost everything written about paying off debt gives you the same five steps in the same order, with no numbers attached — and without the numbers you cannot tell which step matters. On a $20,000 balance at 24.99%, the amount you send every month is worth roughly $14,000 over the life of the payoff. The order you attack the debts in is worth about $1,000. Most articles spend their whole length on the $1,000 decision.
So we put the figure next to the step. Every payoff calculation on this site states its interest rate and its assumptions, and is reproducible from them.
Topics are chosen from measured demand rather than guesswork: the current library was ordered using roughly 1,900 real Google autocomplete queries collected for the United States, and for the highest-demand topics we read the actual top ten results before writing — to find what was missing instead of repeating what was already there.
Facts are checked against primary sources before publication: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, the United States Courts, the IRS, the Federal Reserve and state statutes. We link the source, not a secondary article about the source.
What we don’t do
- We don’t give individual advice. We explain mechanisms. What is right for you depends on your income, your state and your specific accounts, and a website cannot know any of that.
- We don’t push products that hurt the reader. No payday lenders, no advance-fee debt relief, no “government program” that does not exist.
- We don’t publish numbers we cannot source. Where a figure changes over time or varies by state, we link the official source instead of repeating a number from memory. Several state-law tables on this site are deliberately left empty for exactly that reason — a stale table in this subject is worse than no table.
- We don’t take your data. No accounts, no newsletter, no comments. See the Privacy Policy.
How we’re funded
This site is supported by display advertising. Advertising is sold and placed by a third-party network; we do not choose which advertisers appear, and their presence is not an endorsement.
No advertiser sees an article before it is published, none can change or remove a conclusion, and no topic is chosen or dropped because of what it pays. Some articles are excluded from advertising on purpose — material about medical debt in serious illness, and material addressed to people in acute financial crisis. Full detail in the Advertiser Disclosure.
About me
My name is Alonso Pinar Jimenez. I am a web developer with a real passion for building things online, and PayoffPath is one of them.
I am not a financial adviser, a credit counselor or an attorney, and I am not going to pretend otherwise on a site about money and bankruptcy law. What I do is the part I am actually good at: finding what people are asking, reading the primary sources, doing the arithmetic properly, and laying it out so that it can be checked. Every calculation here can be reproduced; if one of them is wrong, it can be proven wrong, and that is deliberate.
The part I cannot supply myself is professional review, and I would rather say so than imply a credential I do not have.
Expert review: where we actually stand
This is a YMYL subject — money and law — and our standard is that an article is not finished until someone with the relevant credential has checked it:
- Bankruptcy articles — practicing bankruptcy attorney.
- Debt, credit and payoff articles — Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®) or CFP®.
- Tax articles — Enrolled Agent or CPA.
That review is in progress and is not complete. Articles that have not been through it say so, on the article, in plain sight. We do not use a generic “Editorial Team” byline as a substitute for a credential. The full process is in our Editorial Policy.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong we want to know, and we will fix it and say that we did. We correct in place and add a dated note; we do not quietly delete errors.
Get in touch
Write to zykoadministracion@gmail.com or use the contact form. Corrections, questions about a source, requests to quote — all welcome. I am always open to new ideas and projects.
What I cannot do is tell you what to do about your own debt. If you need personal help, two starting points that are usually free: a nonprofit credit counselor accredited by the NFCC or a member of AFCPE, or a first consultation with a bankruptcy attorney.