How are you finding the SOA & Snowball Calculators at MSOC?

roger196

SOA's are very useful. It would help if figures would line up correctly when posted on this website. Also get rid of pence. Is it possible to link up known income with benefits. This checks whether, for example, housing benefit is being claimed and approx the correct amount. If there are two children, a check column for child benefit.
Comparison with target figures eg for groceries calculating absolute difference. Might be worth differentiating between priority and non-priority debts/expenses. Greater clarity is needed for what fraction of expenses to include when SOA relates to only one half of a couple eg one going br but not the other.
Pop up reminder boxes are useful when completing a form eg that council tax often paid in ten instalments.

andrea1968_2

The snowball calculator is brilliant.Thanks to you I will now be debt free by March:j and it would have been months and months longer than that how I was spreading the payments before.

A MASSIVE MASSIVE thankyou:T

NellyM029

They are amazing tools and definitely helped me make sense of money. I think you deserve a trophy or something for them for being clever

Clariman

Kayleighpea wrote: »

Hi Clariman,

I havent used the SOA one but do use the Snowball Calculator.

The only problem I have found with it is that for my Halifax Overdraft for example, I have to pay £30 charges every month (£1 a day for the pleasure of using the overdraft), but if I put in the snowball that my min payment each month is this £30 a month, it looks like every month I am paying this amount off, when in fact I am just putting the money in to cover the charges coming out.

Is there any way to get round this? As my DFD can never be accurate if it thinks I am paying money off when I'm not!

Thank you

Hi Kayleighpea

As carkeyz says, it would probably be better to treat that as a monthly expense rather than as a debt. If you are just using the snowball calculator on its own, then just reduce the amount you enter in "Total Money available for debt repayments £" by 30 and that should cater for it.

That would make the snowball calculator work OK. However, it means it wouldn't factor the £30 in when assessing which debt to snowball first. At £30 a month, it wouldn't surprise me if your overdraft was your most expensive debt. If your overdraft is £1000, then the £30 per month fee is going to work out at £360 per year ... or approx 36% interest. If you also pay actual interest (as opposed to the fee) on your overdraft, then this would be a very expensive debt.

Clariman

Clariman

roger196 wrote: »

SOA's are very useful. It would help if figures would line up correctly when posted on this website.

The figures should line up correctly if users use the "Format for MSE" button on the calculator and if they copy-and-paste all the SOA details correctly.

Also get rid of pence.

I suspect some people prefer to see the pence!

Is it possible to link up known income with benefits. This checks whether, for example, housing benefit is being claimed and approx the correct amount. If there are two children, a check column for child benefit.
Comparison with target figures eg for groceries calculating absolute difference. Might be worth differentiating between priority and non-priority debts/expenses.

Hmmm. I like some of those ideas. Might be fiddly and would probably have to link to external sources. Let me give it some thought.

Greater clarity is needed for what fraction of expenses to include when SOA relates to only one half of a couple eg one going br but not the other.

I don't want to be too prescriptive on how people complete the calculator. It is a tool that people can use in a way that makes sense to them (e.g. complete details for a couple or only income and expenses for one). The more instructions and the more prescriptive I make it, then the greater the danger that people feel overwhelmed by what they are asked to provide.

Pop up reminder boxes are useful when completing a form eg that council tax often paid in ten instalments.

Yup. Good idea. I have used pop-up boxes on another calculator (see here http://www.stoozing.com/cashcalc.htm where you can hover over an input field and get info). Again the downside of having them on the SOA Calculator is that there are many many boxes, so the pop-ups would appear as you moved the mouse from one box to another.