Excel

carl310166

I have done a simple Excel spreadsheet for my monthly budgeting,and i managed to do it with a bit of help.

Is there anybody who could advise me how do one for credit cards?

Is it easy to do.

Thanks in advance.

Reaper

You could have saved yourself a lot of work on the budgeting spreadsheet by downloading Martin's one from this page.

I'm sure there must be credit cards ones out there but it depends what you are doing with them. For example if you are stoozing (making money out of them) that is very different to managing debt.

Rafter

Be very careful using excel for all but the most simple stuff.

It is so easy to miss out a row from a sum or forget to carry forward a balance.

You may find you are better off with a product like Microsoft Money or quicken which are tried and testing and have really useful features such as reconciliations, projections etc.

If you are looking for something that will check your interest on credit card it is very difficult to work out and all the card companies use different tricks.

Your credit card statement should show your APR and the equivalent monthly interest rate. If you don't pay your bill in full, your interest bill should be your average monthly balance x the monthly rate.

Note that if you don't pay your bill in full you don't get any interest free period on purchases with the vast majority of cards.

R.

carl310166

Thanks both!

I remember now,someone said that it would take a mathematician a long time to work out credit card interest payments!

fazer6

Snowball credit card calculator

westernpromise

carl310166 wrote:

I have done a simple Excel spreadsheet for my monthly budgeting,and i managed to do it with a bit of help.

Is there anybody who could advise me how do one for credit cards?

Is it easy to do.

Thanks in advance.

I'd echo Rafter's remarks. I used to have a spreadsheet which did this. Each card got a column and each transaction got a row. For each card, the total owing by each statement date was in a box to the right. The idea was that I would carry the contents of that box forward to a separate sheet which contained my current account balance.

It worked up to a point but there were two substantial problems. First, there are often multiple transactions in a day. This means you need to keep inserting rows, and as soon as you do that, you break the formulae which look up from one sheet to another. Next, the statement date for cards is not predictable and neither is the payment date. So I was constantly cutting and pasting that cell and having to repair those formulae too.

An Access database is probably better if you are up to it, but better still is Microsoft Money. The 2005 version has been roundly slagged off in the press, so I'd go for a second hand copy of 2004 off eBay. You can predict your account balances as far ahead as you can be bothered to put the data in, and in the case of recurring bills, it does that for you.

I should also add that a link on the MSN Money homepage was what brought me here. I've never looked back

carl310166

Thanks both for taking the time to reply.

I have downloaded the Snowball calculator (haven't looked at it yet),and will keep an eye out for MS money 2004.