Free Online Financial Calculators

Most of us don't remember the first thing about present and future value calculations (especially without the help of a financial calculator). The wonder of the internet makes plenty of good tools available at your fingertips to calculate figures for your retirement, you mortgage, credit cards, investment allocation or business. But, if you use these tools somewhat frequently you may want to bookmark Dinkytown.net. The site has a bunch of easy to use free calculators on just about anything you can think of and also has special calculators for those of you in Australia and Canada.

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Online Personal Finance Calculators

I've said this before, I love the wide variety of online personal finance calculators there are out there to save us everyday folk time. They save people like you and me from breaking out something like this...
Here are three more to add to the list of handy time savers. This group covers the value of your college education, taxation of bonuses and whether you should exercise stock options.

How much is your graduate education worth? This calculator takes what you expect to make before, after, years till retirement and the cost of your education into account. I personally like it because it shows you the break even point to where your education has paid for itself.

What will my bonus net after taxes? This calculator is pretty straightforward, it takes your bonus amount, income, deductions and allowances to determine how much you will get and how much Uncle Sam keeps for himself.

Should I exercise "in the money" options? With obvious shortcomings - since there is no way for the calculator to know if your company is in a downward spiral - this calculator will attempt to give you a good idea about whether or not you should exercise those options floating around in your portfolio (if you are fortunate enough to have some).

What's Your (Personal) Cash Flow?

Any business owner or executive would tell you that cash flow is key. It allows them to pay off debt and gives them a tremendous amount of flexibility. When I worked for a small M&A firm before grad school they used the phrase "cash is king" and did a lot of short hand valuations based on cash flow. The phrase described the ability of an acquiring company to immediately pay down debt and other short term obligations by using the excess cash over immediate liabilities.

Why is this at all important you might ask? Because the same principles apply to you. If you have any sort of budget you likely have a good idea of what your cash flow looks like, but keeping track of this indicator lets you know if you are in the red or black each month and if you should be allocating more money to investments or if you need to tighten up in other areas.

First step, figure out how much you bring in each month by tallying income, investments, pensions, social security and any other income streams you may have. Next, figure out for a month what you spend on everything from groceries and gas to health club dues and child care. Once you have a list of these items you can grab a legal pad & pencil, fire up Excel, or head over to YahooFinance where they have a handy calculator that will let you fill in the blanks.

Links

Yahoo! Cash Flow Calculator

Yahoo Finance

Is it Really Worth it to Move That Money? Interest Rate Chaser Calculator

If you are considering moving funds from one account to another for an increased interest rate I found a tool that might be of interest. It lets you play around entering your current return, new return and the amount of time your funds will be unavailable. The calculator then spits out the total time you need to hold the investment to break even. I actually found this while doing some research for myself after being frustrated with the REALLY slow transfers in and out of HSBCDirect. It's a good bank, but the bank must be making an absolute killing off the float from keeping your transfer "pending." Their policies might be enough to make me send my money back to ING or E*TRADE who are significantly faster. Based on my calculations it is 1) worthless to move more money into HSBC to chase their 6.00% new teaser rate and 2) takes nearly two months to make it worth your while to move say money from ING's 4.5% APY to HSBC or ETRADE's 5.05%.

Anyways, check it out. The calculator might be handy if you are say considering moving from one online bank to another or some other for of investment.

Link:

Interest Chaser Calculator

A calculator for this, a calculator for that

If you haven't noticed I like online calculators because 1) they do a lot of the work for me and 2) they are less prone to mistyped figures and generally take a greater number of factors into consideration than I can without creating an Excel spreadsheet.

With that said there are three more calculators that I think people may find useful. Both are from Bankrate.com which really has a ton of useful stuff if you can wade through it all. The first calculator crunches the numbers on what price house you can afford. The second calculator will help you figure out how much you have to sock away (and let you change the interest rate) to reach a designated savings goal (FYI: $22 a day invested in a 5% savings account like HSBC will net you a cool million 40 years from now).

The third calculator for those of you in the market for a home or wondering if it is worth it will help you decide based on the mortgage price you are interested in, your current rent payment, and your down payment when a house payment becomes more attractive than your current rent. It breaks down the payments and closing costs (with rough estimates) and shows you where the tipping point is between renting vs buying. Head over the youngmoney.com to check it out.