SOA and Snowball Calculators - comments

Clariman

Hello. It is a long time since I last posted on here. I am the author of the SOA Calculator and the Snowball Calculator at makesenseofcards. Just dropping by to see if anyone has any comments, problems, issues, suggestions about the calculators.

Regards
Clariman

_Persephone

It's excellent thank you. I have found that it motivates me to stay on the path to becoming debt free.

I like the fact that you can enter one off amounts of money for up to three amounts in the SOA calculator. I use it to enter overtime money, and look the effect that working overtime will have on clearing my debts. Perhaps you could expand this so that there aren't just three fields for extra amounts. Maybe an 'add another' button.

Another suggestion would be to expand the site to allow us to enter our payday date and when bill become due to make the snowball more accurate.

You could also name the months instead of calling them 'month 1', month 2 month 3 etc.

I hope this doesn't seem picky, I am very grateful for the calculator, just being constructive!

Clariman

Thanks Persephone. When I wrote the Snowball Calculator (I think that was the one you meant), I decided to make it simpler for me to write which is why I allowed for a fixed number of one-off payments, cards and loans. The "add another" functionality on the SOA Calculator ended up being very complex to write and would be even more complex (though not impossible) in the Snowball Calculator. So I took the easy option ) . Will put that on my 'maybe' list.

Your comments about month1, month2 are good. The output of the calculator 'does the job' but I never went back to tidy it up and make it neater. For example, it tells you how much additional to pay on the highest rate card as a separate line, rather than adding the minimum and the additional amount together.

While adding pay and bill-payable dates would make the calculator a little more accurate, it would mean I would have to do daily interest rate calculations rather than monthly, which I don't think wouldt be worth the additional effort and amount of processing required.

Clariman

honeybun16

overall i think your snowball calculator is brilliant, really shows us the right way to go, i just wish i'd found it years ago,

Though i love playing with the figures to see what we could do if we starved for a few months lol

_Persephone

Sorry, yes I did mean the snowball calculator, rather than the SOA calculator!

I work as an software developer too, so I am finding this thread nerdily interesting!

I can see how the date stuff would be a pain in the bum to do. More suggestions:
- Include the description from the one-off payment in the actual snowball. Currently the amount is included, but it's hard to tell where from. Although if you name the months, this would be less of an issue.
- How about saving the export to .csv or pdf format? Some months I can pay off more or less than expected so I like to compare them.
- I alway press 'save' when doing the snowball, but always have to enter the payment amounts and whether it is £ or % in again.
- Include the debt free date at the top of the snowball?

Trajal

They are fantastic tools!

One little point you may want to look at (or tell me where I'm going wrong) is that it's hard to factor in a payday loan with the snowball calculator.

Because of the manner in which it adds up interest I think, anyway it doesn't work too well if you have say 2 payday loans. The way the interest works seems to confuse it!

GeorgieFTB

Now if we are being picky... the SOA calc could do with a little shuffle, eg. phone and internet together now quite a few people get them from the same provider, from memory there are a few others but... arhhh can't quite remember what they are, mostly just making sure that all kid related items are together and all car things are together...

For the snowball calc, again being picky but could overdrafts with daily or monthly charges be included... please

They are brilliant tools, thank you for making them

Gx

Clariman

_Persephone wrote: »

I work as an software developer too, so I am finding this thread nerdily interesting!

I'm not really a software developer. Many, many years ago, I used to be a programmer but that was well before web programming came along. I taught myself javascript in order to write the calculators. If you are interested in the nerdy stuff, the thing that was a real pain was that Internet Explorer does not comply with web standards, so I could get the functionality working perfectly in Firefox, Safari, Opera etc, but IE would behave differently. The "Add another" was a prime example of that. In the code, I have to test which browser is being used and then execute a different piece of code if it is IE!

More suggestions:
- Include the description from the one-off payment in the actual snowball. Currently the amount is included, but it's hard to tell where from. Although if you name the months, this would be less of an issue.

Excellent suggestion

- How about saving the export to .csv or pdf format? Some months I can pay off more or less than expected so I like to compare them.

That would be useful to have, but I think web security prevents me from writing to a user's hard drive from my javascript, other than as cookies. If you can point me towards how I can do that, I'll look at it.

- I alway press 'save' when doing the snowball, but always have to enter the payment amounts and whether it is £ or % in again.

Hmmm. I don't think that should happen. The amounts should all be saved away when using the snowball calculator. Ahhh ... hang on .... do you go back and forwards between the SOA calculator and the snowball calculator and then find you lose the above information? If so, that is how it is designed to operate. The SOA saved data can get loaded into the Snowball calculator and then that is used as the basis for your snowball. There isn't a link back to the SOA calculator so it is really a one-time only link and only in one direction.

- Include the debt free date at the top of the snowball?

Do you mean at the top of the detailed snowball report? Yes, that would be a good idea. That is the sort of thing that I had in mind when tidying up the output. There are some good technical reasons for why it is as it is - will explain them if you want.

Thanks again

Clariman

Trajal wrote: »

One little point you may want to look at (or tell me where I'm going wrong) is that it's hard to factor in a payday loan with the snowball calculator.

Because of the manner in which it adds up interest I think, anyway it doesn't work too well if you have say 2 payday loans. The way the interest works seems to confuse it!

Thanks Trajal. To be honest, I didn't factor in payday loans when I wrote the calculator. Correct me if I am wrong, but a payday loan would typically be for a few hundred pounds and you would probably only borrow it for a week or two? In the bigger scheme of things, would it make a huge difference to your total debt repayment and debt-free date? Off the top of my head, I'd probably treat that more as a monthly expense in my SOA (say £30 interest per month for the payday loan) and that would reduce the amount you have to pay off your main card debts and personal loans. What do others think?

Clariman

GeorgieFTB wrote: »

Now if we are being picky... the SOA calc could do with a little shuffle, eg. phone and internet together now quite a few people get them from the same provider,

Indeed many people do have them bundled, but the calculator needs to cater for those who have them separately still. Also, if presenting the SOA for bankruptcy or DMP purposes, then you may find that they want to see a breakdown anyway because they might now allow satellite TV but they may allow a basic phone service etc.

from memory there are a few others but... arhhh can't quite remember what they are, mostly just making sure that all kid related items are together and all car things are together...

I think they are grouped fairly sensibly??

For the snowball calc, again being picky but could overdrafts with daily or monthly charges be included... please

Can this not be handled by simply adding the monthly charge to the repayment amount?

Thanks
C

Trajal

Payday loan of say 300 will equal about £65 in 'interest' + £300 base amount.

One of 450 will cost about £115 + the £450

So if someone has both of those... they will owe:

Capital value of 450+300=£750
Plus
Interest of 65+115=£180

Basically if you try to snowball those with the calculator using APRs then by the time the first one has been 'overpaid' the second one is astronomical in interest.

The reason I highlight this is because many people seem to be getting into debt and also taking these as the final way to squeeze some cash out, so it's getting more and more common for DFW's to have at least a couple of this kind of loan.

Clariman wrote: »

Thanks Trajal. To be honest, I didn't factor in payday loans when I wrote the calculator. Correct me if I am wrong, but a payday loan would typically be for a few hundred pounds and you would probably only borrow it for a week or two? In the bigger scheme of things, would it make a huge difference to your total debt repayment and debt-free date? Off the top of my head, I'd probably treat that more as a monthly expense in my SOA (say £30 interest per month for the payday loan) and that would reduce the amount you have to pay off your main card debts and personal loans. What do others think?