Debt Shame Score Calculator

This calculator's Debt-to-Income Ratio is not the standard lending DTI used elsewhere on this site (which divides monthly debt payments by monthly income) — it divides your entire Total debt balance by your Annual income (lines 29-31), a different and much larger ratio by construction, so don't compare this percentage directly against the 36% or 43% thresholds mortgage lenders use; those figures apply to the conventional monthly-payment version, not this one. That said, this calculator's OWN internal math does lean on that same 36 figure: dtiPercentile (line 49-50) is built by dividing this calculator's Debt-to-Income Ratio (dtiPercent) by nationalMedianDTI, a constant set to 36 (line 25), and dtiPercentile then carries 30% of the weight in the composite Normalization score (line 55-56). So while you shouldn't read your displayed Debt-to-Income Ratio against the 36%/43% lending thresholds yourself, the engine does use that same 36 as its own internal normalization baseline for a third of your score — it's just using 36 as a rough typical-DTI reference point for this calculator's own (much larger) ratio, not as the literal lending qualification threshold. Credit card debt percentile responds only to Credit card debt itself — Total debt, Annual income, and Your age all measure exactly zero effect on it across a ±10% probe — because it's a separate ratio against the $6,500 national average credit card balance (lines 43-44) that never references your total debt or income at all.

Total debt dominates Total debt percentile: its ±10% span is 16% of Total debt percentile, twice Your age's 8% effect, because age only adjusts the comparison baseline (Age-adjusted avg debt, lines 34-35) rather than the debt figure itself. Assessment sits right on a tier boundary at these defaults: a Normalization score of 46 is only one point from the 45-point line between "below average" (level 2) and "about average" (level 3), so every one of the four inputs — Total debt, Annual income, Credit card debt, and Your age — is individually capable of flipping the Assessment level by exactly one tier with a modest nudge, not just whichever input matters most in general. This calculator does not account for regional cost-of-living differences, debt type (a mortgage and a payday loan count identically here), or changes in the national averages it compares against over time.