As we mentioned earlier, Chase has rolled out some new financial tools to help you track your finances and conquer your credit card debt. All in all, these simply amount to fancy ways of looking at your balance – but as anyone who regularly reads personal finance blogs knows by now, the road to a debt free (or at least a manageable amount of debt) is paved with discipline moreso than breaks from credit card companies. Blueprint offers Chase customers some flashy systems for motivating yourself. It’s completely optional, but it’s also completely free – so you may want to give it a shot. Earlier, we covered Full Pay, which lets you separate out certain categories to pay down first. Today, we’ll go over the rest: Split, Finish and Track It.

Chase Blueprint: Split

Split is a divide and conquer method for paying off a big credit card purchase. Blueprint starts out by showing you your bigger purchases and lets you choose one to target. You can see here that I chose my $10.47 charge at Franchise USA LLC (which I found out is a company that bought out some BP gas stations – be sure to investigate anything on your credit card that looks unfamiliar).

Blueprint also does you the favor of figuring out how much of a monthly payment you’ll have to make at your current APR in order to pay off the balance.

When you log in to your normal Chase online view, you can see your Blueprint payment separated out. Here, this also includes my payment towards my Blueprint Full Pay plan.

And for those who like progress bars, Split Blue print shows you how well you’re doing on your plan, too.

If you had an actual balance beyond the $10 I spent on two packs of beef jerky, your Split summary would look like this. You can see your monthly payments needed as well as how much you have left to go. You can also add another Split, if you please.

Blueprint: Finish It

Finish It is, by and large, the exact same thing as Split, except instead of honing in on a purchase, you can choose an actual dollar figure. This would be extremely useful for one reason: calculating how much it’ll take to pay off your entire credit card debt. If Chase does something to cheese you off and you want to exercise your right to close out your account and move on, you’ll want to pay off your balance in a timely fashion. This calculator shows you how much you need to pay and how long you need to pay it in order to eliminate debt, which can be hard to figure out with interest working against you all the while. Of course, if you plan on paying down your entire balance, you’ll have to adjust your Finish It plan every time you add to your balance.

Finish It gives you two ways to factor – by entering a monthly payment or a number of monthly payments. It’s a handy feature if you need to pay down your debt before applying for an auto loan or a mortgage and need to boost your credit to debt ratio.

Once your done, it’ll give you a Finish It payment amount that you’ll need to meet in order to eliminate your debt.

You can also add multiple Finish It plans, if you’re so inclined.

Blueprint: Track It

Lastly, and perhaps least impressively, Blueprint has the Track It plan. This merely lets you single out certain categories and see how your spending is divided among them. This functionality has been built into most creidt cards since the 20th century, however. The added functionality from Blueprint is the ability to set yourself a budget. Then it throws up a little orange line that shows you when your getting close to, or over, your arbitrary budget. All in all, it’s essentially the same as the budgeting and categorization of Mint.com, except it only pulls from your Chase account and isn’t nearly as dynamic. It’s there, though, if you’d rather not authorize a third-party to rifle through your statements.

Minimum Payments

One thing to note about Blueprint is that, at the end of the day, it’s just a fancy front end for your normal online Chase statement. You’ll still be responsible for paying the same minimum monthly payment. Your Blueprint payment goes towards your minimum monthly payment doesn’t replace it, and if you don’t end up making your minimum monthly payment one way or another, you’ll be in default. And barring balances like balance transfers and cash advances, which have different APRs, all of your credit card debt is essentially one big pool of debt anyway.

So what do you think about Blueprint? Will you be using it regularly? Do you wish your credit card issuer would implement something similar? Or would you rather use a third-party resource or a good ol’ fashioned spreadsheet?

Photo by Adam Baker

Related posts:

1. An Inside Look at Blueprint: Full Pay
2. Credit Card Review: Changes for Chase Freedom
3. 7 Reasons Why Sticking To the Minimum Payment Is a Dumb Idea
4. Track Your Favorite Credit Card Legislation
5. Credit Card Review: Chase Freedom