Overview
Credit Card Debt is an app that simply tracks all of your credit lines. Here's how it works! You enter in all of your credit cards and lines of credit, (like housing, car, student, and personal loans) and the app adds them all up and displays a most depressing number at the top- you total debt! Awesome! You and your friends can compare your debt and see who’s the real American! This is fun for the families... the broke families...
Features
It’s easy to enter your credit card info. For each entry you choose a name, (like a bank name or something more fitting like Plastic Lifeline, and you enter the amount owed on the card as well as the card's total limit. Then you can choose an icon to represent that entry - from the major credit cards, store cards, lines of credit and even gas cards. Once finished, the app displays a bar graph showing you the percentage of your owed/total limit on your card.
You can also select the currency to view your debt in: Dollar, pound, euro, and yen.
Breakdown
The Good:
If you’re serious about wanting to work on getting out of debt, (and odds are you have debt, since I think everyone in America has debt), then the first thing you need to know is how much debt you have. That’s where this app can come in handy. It easily adds and organizes your debt so you know how deep you're into it. But unfortunately… that’s about all it does.
There are plans to include due dates, APR per credit card and total limits in a future update. These will all help make the app a more attractive option because at the moment, it does what a calculator could do just as well. (And a calculator comes free with your iPhone.)
The Bad:
I know this is probably a much more complicated feature to include, but I can wish, so here it goes. It’d be great if there was a way to enter your account information (Identity thieves, listen up!) and have the app update your debt automatically, because, as you know, debts are always fluctuating. Sometimes they go down, most times they go up. It would be swell to not have to enter your debt information yourself all the time because it’s almost more work than it’s worth. I mean, if I have to go online or call to find out my current balance, then I can just as easily write down those totals somewhere and add them myself.
I'm sure that including that feature would be difficult though, as the security risks would be rather high. I mean, I don't even know if I'd want to enter/store my account information in an app in my iPhone. That's kind of asking for it. I realize this is all kind of contradictory, but I'm just thinking out loud here. Brainstorming it up, you know? Can you dig it?
Oh, before I forget, (and how could I?), I have a complaint about the password you have to enter every time you start the app. It's good there's a password. That's important, even though there really isn't any sensitive information inside. I wish that entering your password worked more like the passcode lock on the iPhone settings - where when you enter a number it automatically moves to the next box for the next number. You have to tap each box to enter the numbers. So annoying. I'm a busy man, you know...
Verdict
Since this app currently doesn’t offer enough features, my advice is to wait until a later update. And even then, the 2.99 price tag will still be awfully steep. As an alternative to this app, just create an Excel spreadsheet and track your debt there. That’s free. Assuming you have Excel. (You can get it for free if you're resourceful. And in this trying economy, you'd better be resourceful.
