I have created a budget sheet in Excel to track Debt Snowball payments. I have a formula that successfully works to lookup the month from a list of months (column F) that a final payment is made for a particular column (L), based on there being no further payments entered into that column past the final month:

=XLOOKUP(TRUE,L18:L46<>"",F18:F46,"FAIL",0,-1)

In the above example the date returned is Jul 2024.

What I want to do now, in another cell, is return either the final month a debt will be paid (if further into the future than the current month), or if the current month is greater than or equal to the month the debt was paid (i.e. the debt was paid off in the current month or in the past) then to return the message “PAID OFF!!”

I have created the following formula to do this:

=IF((MONTH(TODAY())>=(XLOOKUP(TRUE,L18:L46<>"",F18:F46,"FAIL",0,-1))),"PAID OFF!!",(XLOOKUP(TRUE,L18:L46<>"",F18:F46,"FAIL",0,-1)))

However the returned value is simply still “Jul 2024” instead of “PAID OFF!!”

Where am I going wrong with this formula, how do I get it to return “PAID OFF!!” as I intend it to?

Thanks in advance!