Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Investment, savings and annuity calculator

I have been trying to improve my skill with Microsoft Excel. Now, I realise how powerful Excel can be in doing financial calculations which can’t be done on a calculator easily. By exploring Excel, it helps me to enhance my knowledge in finance as well.

I frequently used the financial calculators available online to compute my final investment values based on a certain projected returns. However, there is a limitation on all the online calculators. To compute final value of investment or savings, all of them accept only inputs with regular payments or withdrawals. For example, while making monthly contributions to my investment, I want to make some withdrawals and at the same time calculate the final values, I won't be able to do that with those calculators. Probably I have not scanned the World Wide Web completely for such a calculator.

I believe the irregular payments or withdrawals can be computed via software. Alternatively, I can make use of the formulas in Excel to do the job. As such, I came up with a flexible and all in one investment, savings and annuity calculator. You may download this investment, savings and annuity calculator from the link that I posted. Below is a picture of how the calculator looks like in Excel.

I know I am not the first person to come up with such a calculator in Excel, but the completion of this calculator is considered an achievement to me, especially for a person who has a zero finance background just last year.

Investment, savings and annuity calculator in Excel

5 comments:

Lin said...

Interesting. *ding*

Mike Dirnt said...

heh that was super fast! i just posted and you posted comments. even though empty :)

la papillion said...

Hi Mike,

Well done :) Haha, I also have zero finance background last year :)

haha, looks like our 'growth rate' in finance education quite good :)

Anonymous said...

Present value annuity calculator provides the user with two values for the annuity. The present value of an ordinary annuity is used when an annuity provides payments at the end of each period. The present value of an annuity-due is used when the investor purchases an annuity that pays at the beginning of each period.

Mike Dirnt said...

thanks for the feedback. i understand about the beginning and end period.

mine is the ordinary type. so i just would like to standardise to the end type :)