Friday, September 21, 2012

Debt Transfer: Don't include me!


Hey all,

Have you tried debt transfer yet? It's a cool feature that minimizes the number of payments to settle up with your friends (read more about it here). Here are some tips & new additions:


Tips when creating debt transfers

  • Make sure it's beneficial to everyone involved and not just you: sometimes there're huge benefits to creating a debt transfer, minimizing payments from 20 to 5. Sometimes, there is benefit to you but little benefit to the group
  • Make sure everyone evolved knows each other: the debts are transferred around everyone involved. If you pick people who don't know each other, they may end up having to settle up with each other (possible blind date idea? well we're not a dating service).

Good:

Not so good:


Getting out of debt transfers


Some of you wanted to know how you can "get out" of a bad debt transfer. We've just added some features that allow you to do that:

  • Everyone in the debt transfer now has the ability to delete it, just click on the debt transfer and click Delete. Use this carefully because it affects everyone in the group.
  • You can opt out of all debt transfers in the settings page. We don't recommend this because debt transfers can be useful at times, and you can always delete a debt transfer you don't like! However, by request, here it is :)



Why would debt transfer create debts with people I'm even with?

That's because debt transfer moves debts around people involved in it to minimize payments for the entire group.

Here's a simple example, let's say:

  • You owe Alan $50.00
  • Alan owes Bonnie $50.00

If you perform a payment-minimization debt transfer between you, Alan, and Bonnie, the optimized result would be:

  • You owe Bonnie $50.00
  • You and Alan are even
Notice that you did not previously have a debt with Bonnie, but now you do. That's the whole idea of debt transfer, it moves debts around :)

-Billsup team

5 comments:

  1. Tiny typo: Setting Page reads "Debt trasnfers" instead of "Debt transfers"

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why not set it up so that debt is transferred only among friends (or have this as an option).

    You owe Alan $50
    Alan owes Bonnie $50
    Alan owes Kate $50

    You are friends with Alan and Bonnie, but not Kate.

    Debt Transfer will result in:
    -You owe Bonnie $50
    -Alan owes Kate $50

    ReplyDelete
  3. Please make this option's default settings to 'Don't Include Me'. Let the user decide if they want to give with this. I didn't monitor Billsup for quite a long time, once I came back, most of my debts was reshuffled and I am not even able to understand who all participated in that. I wasn't aware of the feature before.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Under the "Treansfer debts" option, there is a "Minimize payments" option.
    After using the "Minimize payments" option, is there a way to reverse it?

    ReplyDelete

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