Home Finances Application
by Tony Shew

Finances is an application to help you calculate some of your home finances, and will calculate your monthly mortgage payments (both endowment and repayment types), and personal and credit card loans. 

Running the application installs an icon on the icon bar, and clicking Select over this icon brings the Mortgage Calculator dialogue box. Clicking again will replace this with the Loans Calculator window. Clicking Menu over the icon bar icon brings up a menu from which you can choose to bring up either window (the Mortgages and Loans options), or to exit the application (the Quit option).

Both the dialogue boxes have a similar layout and appearance and are used in exactly the same way. The following general information applies both the calculators.

On each dialogue box are writable fields where you can enter the details required for the calculation. Press Return after entering each of the details to move the cursor onto the next field. To clear a field before filling in new details hold down Ctrl and press U. 

On the bottom of each dialogue box are three icons named Calc, Save, and Load. Clicking on Calc will calculate the answers and display them on screen.

Each dialogue box starts up with default data which is stored in the !Finances.Data directory. Clicking on the Save icon will save the current data as the default. Clicking on the Load icon will replace the current data with the default.

When one of the dialogue boxes has the input focus, i.e. the title bar is cream in colour and one of the writable fields has the cursor showing, pressing the keyboard keys C, S, or L or pressing the function keys F1, F2, or F3 has the same effect as clicking on the Calc, Save, and Load icons respectively.

MORTGAGES
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The mortgage dialogue box will calculate both repayment and endowment type mortgages. As the information required differs only in that repayment mortgages have one more writable field, all the instructions regarding use of the endowment calculator apply equally to the repayment calculator.

MORTGAGES: ENDOWMENT
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Fill in the mortgage details as follows:

Mortgage  = the total amount of the mortgage loan.

Interest % = the current annual rate of interest; this is not the A.P.R., which is sometimes quoted as well.

Tax Rate % = the current tax rate that applies to mortgages. This is currently (as at August 1992) 25% for all mortgage payers regardless of the rate of tax you pay on your earnings.

Mortgage Relief  = MIRAS tax relief is usually 30000, but this can vary depending upon when the mortgage was taken out and whether or not any other loans have been taken out against the property. An entry of 0 under Mortgage relief will show the gross payment before tax relief.

Insurances  = enter here any other payments you make in with your mortgage, e.g. endowment, life assurances, mortgage protection policies.

Accuracy: the endowment mortgage calculator is very accurate. However, some banks or building societies may round up or down differently to the formulae I have used, but the result should never be more than one penny out.

MORTGAGES: REPAYMENT
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The instructions for using the repayment mortgage calculator are the same as for the endowment mortgage calculator above. However, the repayment mortgage calculator also needs to know the number of years the mortgage is to be paid over. Enter this in the Mortgage Term Yrs field.

Accuracy: The problem with calculating repayment mortgages is that there is more than one method to calculate the constant net payments. Therefore the answer given by the program may not be as accurate as the endowment mortgage calculator is. However, the margin of error should be small.

LOANS: CREDIT CARD
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Enter the following details:

Loan  = amount of loan outstanding.

Payment  = monthly payment. If your repayment is less than one month's interest plus 1 then the calculator will take the payment as being 1 more than the monthly interest, otherwise the total loan outstanding will take forever to reduce.

Interest % = monthly interest rate.

The credit card calculator will show you:
(a) the annual percentage rate (A.P.R.) of the loan. This can be compared with the cost of a personal loan for a similar amount.
(b) how many months it will take to pay off the loan. The last payment will usually be less than the standard monthly payment.
(c) the total cost of the loan.

Accuracy: as lenders usually calculate the interest on a daily, rather than a monthly, basis the total cost of the loan given by the credit card calculator can only be taken as an approximate guide. However it will be very close and can be used as a good guide to the actual cost of goods bought by this method.

LOANS: PERSONAL LOAN
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Enter the following details.

Loan = amount of loan.

A.P.R. = annual percentage rate of interest charged on loan.

Months = number of months the loan will be paid back over.

The personal loan calculator will show the monthly payment and the total cost of the loan, useful in comparing against the cost of a credit card purchase. Personal loans are also known as bank loans.

Accuracy: the A.P.R. quoted by lenders is always shown truncated, not rounded up, to one decimal place. Therefore a true A.P.R. of 12.39% would be quoted as 12.3%. This means the answer shown may be out by a few pence, but it is still a very good guide. The personal loan calculator works on the assumption that one month will elapse between the loan being received and the first payment being made. Some lenders work on 21 days between loan and first payment and this can make a small difference to the payments. Also, some lenders calculate interest on a daily rather than a monthly basis, but this should not make much difference.

 RISC User 1992
