From The Preface

What is personal finance? An informal definition is “how you interact with money.” Among the subcategories of personal finance are topics such as budgeting, saving, borrowing, investing, gambling, and buying and selling real estate. Many books, courses, professional advisors, and software programs are available to help you optimize your path through your financial life.

This book is about various forms of borrowing and saving money, and includes some discussion of investing money. Borrowing money takes many forms, including home mortgage loans, auto loans, and credit card debt. Saving money includes putting money under your mattress, depositing it into a savings bank, and buying certificates of deposit (CDs). Insurance policies can be thought of as a special kind of pooled savings plan whereby many people put money into the same savings account, and this money becomes available to these people when a specified special need (illness, repairing a car, death benefit) unexpectedly arises. Investing is an opportunity to earn more money with your money than a savings bank will give you, but with less certainty about the earnings and, for that matter, less certainty about maintaining your original money than a government-insured savings account would give you.

When you borrow money or, equivalently, take a loan from a person, a bank, a mortgage company, or elsewhere, you will be expected to pay a fee for the use of this money. The amount you borrow is called the principal of your loan and the fee you pay for borrowing the money is called the interest. The amount of interest you have to pay is based upon the principal, the amount of time you have the money, and the prevailing financial conditions. The longer you have this money, the more interest you can expect to pay. In common situations such as a home mortgage or a car loan, you usually repay the loan gradually over a period of time. In this case, calculating the interest gets a little messy because the amount you owe at any given time (the balance) is being reduced due to your payments, while it is simultaneously being increased by the accrual of interest based on your balance at that time. In a properly structured loan, your payments are large enough that the balance decreases after each payment and eventually goes to 0, so that your loan is paid off.

The concepts and calculations for a simple one repayment loan and for multiple payment loans such as mortgages and car loans are the same; it’s just that in the latter cases you have to repeat the same calculations many times. Before the era of spreadsheets on personal computers and the Internet, the complexity of the multiple calculations was so significant that only banks and mortgage companies and other large financial institutions could undertake them. When you took a loan, you would be provided with a table of payment due dates and loan balances (an amortization table) for your loan. Comparing different loan opportunities was very difficult unless you wanted to spend a lot of time in the library working with books of loan tables.

Today, everybody can easily calculate loan details themselves. Pocket calculators with all the necessary financial functions built-in are inexpensive and easy to use. Users of spreadsheet programs on personal computers can generate their own amortization tables based on the financial functions built into these spreadsheets and/ or can build up these formulas from basic principles. Most common financial calculations are available on the Internet online in the form of simple calculators designed specifically for a single type of problem.

My goal in writing the book is to explain how even the most involved loan scenarios can be understood just by repeated application of the fundamental concept of compound interest, which is the subject of Chapter 2. I’ll show how to calculate everything involved with these loans using a computer spreadsheet program, and whenever possible, I’ll reference some online calculators—particularly those on my own website.

The spreadsheet calculators used in this book are all available on my website (www.lawrencedworsky.com). Chapter 15 shows you how to get a free spreadsheet program if you need one, how to get to the spreadsheets I’m providing, and a general introduction on how I’m setting them up and how to use and maintain them.