Learn Unowe in 17 minutes

Nothing leaves your device

Before anything else, one thing worth understanding, because it shapes everything that follows. Your figures are encrypted here, in your own browser, with a key made from your password. The server only ever holds your email address and a password hash, so you can sign in. Nobody at Unowe can read your balances, because nobody at Unowe ever receives them. That is a genuine privacy guarantee, and it comes with a genuine cost: if you forget your password and lose your recovery key, nobody can restore your plan for you. We will come back to that in part four, and it matters more than anything else in this course.

Take-home, not CTC

Start with what actually reaches your bank account each month. Take-home pay, after tax and after every deduction. Not your cost to company, and not your gross salary. This is the single most common mistake people make here, and it is not a small one. If your C T C is eighteen lakh but twelve and a half lakh reaches your account, entering eighteen inflates every figure downstream: your surplus, your debt-free date, how much the plan thinks you can send at your loans. An optimistic number here produces a plan you cannot actually follow.

Expenses you actually have

Then your monthly expenses, by category. Be honest rather than aspirational. The temptation is to enter what you think you should spend on eating out, rather than what you did spend last month. Resist it. If you have three months of bank statements, use the average, not the best one. What is left after your expenses and every E M I is your surplus, and the surplus is the entire engine of this plan. Understate your expenses and you will build a plan that quietly assumes money you do not have.

Original loan amount — not today's balance

Now the field that catches almost everyone. This is the original loan amount: the sum you were sanctioned on the day the loan started. It is not today's outstanding balance. The tool works out what you still owe by amortising forward from the start month you give it, month by month, exactly as your lender does. So if you took a forty lakh home loan four years ago and you enter today's balance of thirty-six lakh instead, the tool treats thirty-six lakh as the original sanction, and quietly understates both your debt and your E M I. Your plan will look better than your life is. Enter the original amount, and let the tool do the arithmetic.

Rate, tenure, start month

Next, the interest rate, the tenure in months, and the month the loan started. The start month is what anchors the amortisation, so get it right to the month if you can. If your E M I differs from what the tool calculates, because your rate changed or the bank rounded, you can override the E M I directly and the plan will use your figure instead of its own.

Lock-in and prepayment penalty

Two fields people skip, and should not. If your loan has a prepayment lock-in, the number of months before the lender will accept any prepayment at all, put it in. If there is a prepayment penalty as a percentage, put that in too. The plan respects both. It will park money aside during a lock-in and fire it the month the lock-in expires, and it will account for the penalty when deciding whether prepaying that loan is worth it. A plan that ignores a lock-in will confidently tell you to do something your bank will simply refuse.

Importing a statement

If typing loans in by hand feels like work, you can import a bank statement as C S V or P D F instead, and the tool will find the E M I transactions for you. That parsing happens entirely inside your browser. The raw statement never leaves your device, and it is never uploaded anywhere. Check whatever it extracts before you accept it — statement formats vary wildly between Indian banks, and the tool will tell you plainly when a row looked wrong rather than guessing at it.

Freedom lands …

This is the month your last rupee of debt clears, given everything you entered. It is not a promise and it is not a forecast. It is arithmetic on your numbers, and it moves the moment your numbers move. Add a bonus, and it comes forward. Miss three months of prepayments, and it slides back. Treat it as a target that responds to what you do, rather than a date you have been given.

Principal cleared

The ring around it shows how much of your original principal you have already cleared. Watch this rather than your balance when you want encouragement. In the early years of any long loan, almost every rupee of your E M I goes to interest and the balance barely moves — that is how amortisation works, and it is the single most demoralising fact about a home loan. The ring shows the progress the balance hides.

Deployable surplus

Deployable surplus is what remains each month after your expenses and every E M I. This is the money the plan actually has to work with. If it is negative, the plan cannot start at all, and the tool says so plainly instead of pretending. That is not a failure of the tool. It is the tool telling you the truth: no repayment strategy exists when more goes out than comes in, and the only fix is to raise income or cut expenses.

Health score

The health score summarises three things at a glance: how much of your income goes to E M I payments, how much of your emergency buffer you have built, and how far through your debt you are. It is a rough guide rather than a grade, and one number can drag it down on its own — an E M I load above forty per cent of income will dominate it, because in practice that is what makes a household fragile.

Avalanche order

Loans are attacked highest interest rate first. That is the avalanche method, and mathematically it is the cheapest way out of debt — always, without exception. You will hear about the snowball method too, clearing the smallest balance first. Snowball is worse arithmetic and better psychology: it gives you a loan fully cleared sooner, which some people need to keep going. If avalanche order means your credit card at forty per cent gets everything for two years while your car loan sits untouched, and that would make you give up, snowball is the better plan for you. The cheapest plan you abandon is worth less than the costlier one you finish.

Interest saved, versus EMIs alone

This compares your plan against simply paying each E M I and nothing more. It is the number that tells you whether the effort is worth it. Watch for one thing: when your E M I payments alone would never clear the debt inside the thirty-year horizon the tool projects, it shows a dash here rather than a figure. That is deliberate. A saving measured against a loan that never ends is not a real saving, and quoting one would be a lie dressed as encouragement.

This month's moves

And underneath, the concrete moves for this month: how much to send at which loan, how much into the emergency fund, how much to invest. One instruction at a time, in rupees, so there is nothing to interpret. When you tell your bank to prepay, ask them to reduce the tenure rather than the E M I. Reducing tenure is what saves interest. Reducing the E M I feels better each month and costs you far more over the life of the loan.

Emergency fund first

Before investing anything, the plan fills an emergency fund — a few months of your outflow, parked somewhere you can reach within a day or two. This is not caution for its own sake. Without a buffer, one hospital bill or one month between jobs puts your whole plan onto a credit card at thirty-six to forty-two per cent, and undoes years of careful prepayment in a single quarter. The buffer is not idle money. It is what stops your plan being fragile.

How many months?

How many months you need depends on how replaceable your income is. A salaried government job and a freelance income are not the same risk. Three months is a common floor; six is comfortable; if you are self-employed or a single earner supporting a family, more. Set it honestly, because this is the number that determines how long before the plan starts putting money into markets.

Where the surplus goes

Once you are debt free, the surplus flows here, across index funds, flexi cap, debt and P P F, gold, and liquid. These weights are yours to set, and the blended return they produce is what every projection in the tool runs on. Change them and watch the debt-free date and the final corpus move. That responsiveness is the point: this is a model you interrogate, not a recommendation you accept.

Return assumptions

And the return assumptions behind them. These are estimates, not promises, and the tool says so. If you want a plan you are unlikely to be disappointed by, lower them. An equity assumption of twelve per cent is defensible over decades; it is meaningless over three years, because markets do not deliver averages on schedule. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy anything, and Unowe is not registered with S E B I to give you one.

The honest break-even

Prepay the loan, or invest the money? This is the return your investment must beat, after tax and after charges, for investing to have been the better choice. Most rules of thumb get this badly wrong. The usual shortcut is loan rate times one minus your tax rate, which assumes every rupee of home loan interest is saving you tax. It is not. Section twenty-four B caps that deduction at two lakh a year. Once your interest is above that ceiling, the extra interest saves you no tax at all — so prepaying gives up far less relief than the shortcut assumes, and the honest break-even is lower than you have been told. The tool shows you both numbers, and tells you when the shortcut would have misled you.

Old versus new regime

And your tax regime, computed on your real deductions for this financial year rather than a generic example. Two things the tool handles that many calculators miss. Section eighty-seven A marginal relief, just above twelve lakh, where without it a hundred rupees of extra income appears to cost you sixty-two thousand in tax. And surcharge marginal relief at fifty lakh and above, where the same cliff appears at a much larger scale. Both are real provisions in the Act, both exist precisely to remove those cliffs, and if your number here is lower than a plain slab table suggested, that is why.

Log what you actually did

Each month, record what you really prepaid and really invested. Not what you intended. The log compares your figures against what the plan asked for that month and marks it on track, partial, or behind. This is the least glamorous screen in the tool and the one that decides whether any of this works. A plan you never measure against reality is not a plan, it is a wish with a spreadsheet attached.

Editing a month you already logged

Pick a month you have logged before and its figures load straight into the boxes, ready to edit. Whatever sits in those boxes when you save is what gets stored. So if you clear one deliberately, it records a zero, deliberately. Behind that small behaviour is a bug we found and fixed: the form used to open blank, so correcting one figure silently wiped the other one.

Behind is information, not failure

Do not be discouraged by a run of partial or behind months. That is information, not judgement. Three behind months in a row usually means the plan is asking more of you than your life allows, and the honest response is to revise the surplus downward so the plan matches reality. A plan you consistently miss teaches you nothing. A plan you consistently meet, even a slower one, compounds.

The report is also your backup

Export the P D F report. It is a readable summary of your plan and your progress, and it also carries your entire plan inside it as data. So importing that same P D F on a new laptop or a new phone restores everything exactly as it was. That is worth understanding properly, because it is your backup: the file in your downloads folder is not just a document, it is the only copy of your plan outside this browser.

Import replaces everything

Importing replaces your whole plan, not just the parts that differ, so the tool asks you to confirm and describes both plans side by side before it does anything. If you import the wrong file, there is an undo. Take the confirmation seriously anyway — read which plan is which before you click.

Your recovery key

And the most important screen in the entire tool. Your data is encrypted with a key derived from your password. If you forget that password, this recovery key is the only way back to your data. There is no server copy, by design, so nobody can reset it for you — not support, not us, nobody. That is the flip side of the privacy promise we started with. Write this key down on paper and put it somewhere you will still find it in five years. Not in a note on the same laptop. Not in an email to yourself. On paper, somewhere physical. If you do one thing after this course, do that.