Financial Tools

Calculate Your Future with Finance Calculators

Can I afford a new car? How much should I pay per month to fully settle my outstanding loan in a year’s time? How much should I save now to assure a comfortable retirement? Should I grab that college loan repayment or charge books and tuition to my credit card?

Questions regarding personal finance are long and endless. They can range from short-term problems about budgeting and investing to more long-term goals such as planning for retirement. It is normal to be apprehensive when you are confronted with a lot of numbers and so many complex choices. Fortunately, help is only a click away with the various online finance calculators currently available.

The most common financial tools used by people to make monetary decisions are budget calculators, loan calculators, and retirement calculators. Several websites often carry these types of financial calculators as tools in offering financial advice. Here are brief descriptions of these tools and how they can be useful to you.

Budget calculators are handy tools for managing your cash flow. Generally, these calculators will analyze your spending and suggest where and how much you can cut back. Budget calculators are pretty easy to use and require basic information that you can easily provide right off the bat.

Loan calculators can come in many different forms. There are specific calculators designed for car loans, home loans, student loans, and other personal loans. These tools will provide you with a view of how much you can borrow based on your income and net worth, how much your estimated amortizations will be, and how long it would take you to settle the loan.

Loan calculators are very useful in helping you decide on the terms of a loan you are planning to take. Often, in getting a loan it is a choice between paying high amortizations for a short period of time and making relatively smaller payments for longer periods. Loan calculators can analyze where you will most benefit by taking into account possible interests and charges that will be compounded into the principal loan amount. Interest and finance charges can be quiet complex but these calculators can actually help you compare different loans and different repayment plans and help you to decide what is the best deal for you.

Retirement calculators generally determine how much you will have to save now in order to assure yourself of a comfortable future in your old age. Often, retirement calculators will require you to enter a desired annual income during retirement. Here you should take into account expected increase in medical bills in addition to your plans for trips and vacations. Many people assume that by saving a certain amount of their income now is enough to make them financially secure when they are 65. However, the value of money decreases over time and you will need retirement calculators to compute the real worth of your savings by your retirement age.

Crunching numbers to help you decide on money matters just got easier with these handy finance calculators.

Hate Math? Hate Budgeting? Use Finance Calculators

For many people, budgeting, comparing mortgages or credit cards, and computing interests on loans is a rather difficult exercise.

For me, financial planning was the last thing I ever wanted to do- until I accidentally stumbled on this very colorful website that featured a budget calculator. After keying in a few numbers, out came a graph which basically told me that I was digging myself into a financial rut with my “freestyle” budgeting. From then on I was hooked.

I was surprised that there are actually online financial tools that can help you analyze your spending tendencies. You basically just have to key in your income (not hard at all considering how many times you look and look at your pay slip wondering where all the money went), how much you spend for common things like food, clothing, education, recreation, etc. and voila! The budget calculator shows you where you are possibly overspending and provides an alternative distribution that would allow you more savings. Plus, these websites with the budget calculators offer free financial management advice and budgeting tips.

Before, all credit cards appeared the same to me. I hate reading the small print so I go by the credit limit the company is willing to give me. It was only when I got the hang of online finance calculators that I saw one can which helped me to compare credit cards.

There is a debt pay off calculator which analyzes how much you will have to pay for a certain period to totally settle your outstanding balance and a “real cost of debt” calculator which wiped the smile out of my face. As with the budget calculators, I stumbled into the credit card calculator on a personal finance website which features articles on finding the best credit card.

While on the subject of finance calculators, a friend was telling me the other day that if she had to do things all over again, she would not have taken on that much on her student loan. In fact, she blames her student loan debt for her failure to finish college. Student loans are painful because when you are in default of your payments, the school can hold your transcripts and other school documents effectively preventing you from transferring to another school or even applying for jobs that require these records. If only she came across the various student loan calculators now available online, she would have made a more informed decision. Student loan calculators can analyze if the amount you intend to borrow is manageable based on your anticipated starting income or likely to be heavy and burdensome for you.
Whew! Life sure got easier with finance calculators.

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