SOA and Snowball Calculators - comments

_Persephone

Hi Clairiman,

Unfortunately I don't develop on anything as exciting as the web, although I have been meaning to learn java for quite some time now. So I wouldn't know where to point you But the analysis part is still the same.

For those not happy with the categories on the SOA, I would suggest using the 'Add another' button that you painstakingly developed

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.

Yes I do flit back and forth between the SOA and snowball, so that makes perfect sense.

Could you accommodate overdrafts at all? Like allowing a negative value in the 'cash' field or something? Or 'current bank balance'? I have an overdraft on my current account, that is very much a debt, but I don't pay off a set amount each month - or if I do I might use it up again. I enter this on the snowball and put in that I pay off £1 a month, as that is as accurate as I can get.

Clariman

Thanks for the detail Trajal. The way I look at snowballing is that it is all about paying off your debt in the most effective way over a period of months or years. Whereas, payday loans have a much smaller horizon - being something that would be paid off within 30 days i.e. it doesn't span months or years. Is that correct or do people typically struggle to pay off payday loans over a period of months? Based on my understanding of them, I would use the calculators as follows (but am not saying that it has to be this way, nor that the calculators are perfect at supporting payday loans) ....

1. If pay day loans are paid off within the month and are taken back out again in most months, then I would consider treating the interest as a monthly expense in the SOA. The capital coming in during the month is the same as the capital going out each month (as it is repaid) so they balance each other out. That just leaves the interest to be catered for so I would include it as an expense in the SOA. So, I'm saying that if this is the scenario then I wouldn't include the payday loan in the snowball plan because it has a within-month horizon rather than across multiple months.

2. If the payday loan would not be paid off within the month then I would enter it as any other debt in the SOA and snowball plan. Surely it still makes sense to overpay the one with the highest APR first because it will cost you more than a second payday loan with a slightly lower APR. Of course, the APR of that one will still be way higher than the APRs on your credit cards, but that is the nature of the beast isn't it and wouldn't the Snowball calc still generate the best plan for paying off the debts?

3. A 3rd scenario. If you a one-off payday loan that will get paid off within 30 days and you don't expect to need another one next month, then you could treat it as follows. Enter it in the Snowball calculator under the Secured Loans sections as a loan that has a payment of £x and has only one payment to be made before it is done. That way it will get handled by the snowball calc before it moves on to the credit card debts.

How do others treat payday loans in the calculators?

Clariman

Could you accommodate overdrafts at all? Like allowing a negative value in the 'cash' field or something? Or 'current bank balance'? I have an overdraft on my current account, that is very much a debt, but I don't pay off a set amount each month - or if I do I might use it up again. I enter this on the snowball and put in that I pay off £1 a month, as that is as accurate as I can get.

Hmmm. Need to think about that one.

Trajal

Well i think because of the 'interest and admin' costs they are desirable to pay off before anything else and clearly should be snowballed. However if someone has 2+ payday loans of around 800 total or whatever, they may struggle to pay them both off straight away, many people only have a few extra hundred after meeting other minimum payments.

What I was saying is that APR doesn't really work well in calculations for payday loans. Probably just me being thick tho !

DVardysShadow

Hi Clariman

My suggestion for the SoA calc is a feature to allow entry of weekly, 4 weekly, monthly or annual pay. I would suggest doing this with entry boxes for the amounts and dropdowns for the period off to the side, which fills in the monthly amount into the existing entry box.

Clariman

DVardysShadow wrote: »

Hi Clariman

My suggestion for the SoA calc is a feature to allow entry of weekly, 4 weekly, monthly or annual pay. I would suggest doing this with entry boxes for the amounts and dropdowns for the period off to the side, which fills in the monthly amount into the existing entry box.

That's another good idea. I would need to redesign the layout of the calculator big time but that would certainly help some users. That's a maybe.

Having asked for feedback and suggestions, I am interested in how it can be improved. However, I should probably set expectations that the calculators are things that I have written in my spare time, so updates won't necessarily happen very quickly.

Another thought I had was re-developing the calculators as Smartphone (iPhone or Android) apps. Would people be interested in that? It is not something that I have looked at in any detail, but thought that it could be very helpful for people.

Clariman

DVardysShadow

Clariman wrote: »

- 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.

Having taken a look myself, I don't think you can do it from Javascript. There is an IE only workaround, but it is bad in principle on grounds of Javascript should not write any more than cookies and on grounds of you should not be providing different functionality to different browsers. You have had enough grief with cross browser issues already - and less than half the users are using IE any way.

You could dump a CSV into a text box and allow the user to manually cut and paste. But for a pdf, I would think you would need to do this server side - which then raises quite a few security issues.

Clariman

Thanks DVardysShadow. I think you are right - server side would be the only way of doing it, but then I'd be storing people's SOAs and Snowball plans on the server which then means we need to manage logins and security for the information ... and I didn't want to go there. Maybe that's where a smartphone app would be better.

tbourner

_Persephone wrote: »

Could you accommodate overdrafts at all? Like allowing a negative value in the 'cash' field or something? Or 'current bank balance'? I have an overdraft on my current account, that is very much a debt, but I don't pay off a set amount each month - or if I do I might use it up again. I enter this on the snowball and put in that I pay off £1 a month, as that is as accurate as I can get.

Yes, or on snowball maybe just have a tick box that allows the bank account to be calculated differently to the other debts. Another thing this would solve is when you have debts that you can't overpay, the snowballing (or not) just goes on forever, with a bank account row that increased with the leftover monthly payments it would give you a positive value that would then be used to pay off the debts when it got high enough - therefore bringing the DFD in.

DVardysShadow

Clariman wrote: »

Thanks DVardysShadow. I think you are right - server side would be the only way of doing it, but then I'd be storing people's SOAs and Snowball plans on the server which then means we need to manage logins and security for the information ... and I didn't want to go there. Maybe that's where a smartphone app would be better.

Hah, there you are becoming platform specific. You'll bring down a lot on yourself if you have to support multiple platforms.

A Java applet might do the job - it is certainly platform neutral - but I am out of touch with the extent to which Java is available by default. It would be a bit of a handicap to require your users to do a Java install.

As a little test, using FF in Linux, I have just done a trivial SoA and formatted for MSE. The pop up window works well and I have been able to print this to a pdf file. So I am wondering if the way to get pdfs of SoA's is for you to produce an html formatted presentation of the SoA into a popup browser window [with controls available] and for the user then to use a 'print to pdf' function from his system. Obviously, I have no idea if you can do this as standard from windows.