Financial Calculators

Financial calculators are handy tools that helps you to plan your personal finance. Here is a list of some good calculators.

Compound Interest Calculator
http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm

Portfolio Performance Calculator
http://www.moneychimp.com/features/portfolio_performance_calculator.htm

Compound Annual Growth Rate (Annualized Return)
http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm

How Does Inflation Impact My Standard Of Living?
http://www.utvi.com/calculator.php?id=bud01

Personal Finance » Calculators
http://www.utvi.com/all_calculators.php?gclid=CNXklNqxjZQCFQUYewodvysCIQ

Present Value Calculator
http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/present_value_calculator.htm

Related links:

Rule of 72

Rule of 72

Calculate compound interest right in your head.

Having a phone call from your banker or just calculating your EMI, compound interest is always a rocket science for you. Either you need a scientific calculator or some worksheet application like excel to calculate this. Wait… You can do this right in your head without anything.

I am not joking. Its very simple. As simple as table of six. The technique is using Rule of 72.

Rule of 72 a very useful skill to have because it gives you a lightning fast benchmark to determine how good (or not so good) a potential investment is likely to be.

The rule says that to find the number of years required to double your money at a given interest rate, you just divide the interest rate into 72. For example, if you want to know how long it will take to double your money at eight percent interest, divide 8 into 72 and get 9 years (assuming that the interest is annually compounded, by the way).

As you can see, the “rule” is remarkably accurate, as long as the interest rate is less than about twenty percent; at higher rates the error starts to become significant.

OK. That’s fine. How about calculating the rate of interest?

Just put your head into the reverse gear.

If you want to double your money in six years, just divide 6 into 72 to find that it will require an interest rate of about 12 percent.

Puzzled? Want to know Why the rule of 72 works.

Visit following links:

1. http://www.moneychimp.com/features/rule72_why.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72

Money Manager Ex – SQL Query

Money Manager Ex is a personal finance management software. It lets you manage your personal faineance. You can manage  your expenses, investments and stocks using Money Manager Ex. The most appealing feature of this software is custom reports. It lets you run custom queries against its Sqlite database.

In my previous post on Money Manager, I explained its different features. In this post, I will explain how you can get category wise report of your expenses. Money manager manages your accounts in categories and sub-categories. It has many pre-defined categories. Each category is further classified into subcategories. Usually these are sufficient for the general use.

However you can create new category or subcategory easily. One lacking feature of this software is that it does not provide category-wise report of your transactions. You can see transactions summed up by sub-categories however.

To overcome this shortcoming, I wrote a simple SQL statement that allowed me to see the amount I spent on different categories.

SQL to view category-wise report:
The SQL statement to see categori-wise report is written below.

select a.categid, categname, round(sum(transamount),0) amount from checkingaccount_v1 a inner join category_v1 b on a.categid = b.categid group by a.categid having transdate >= ‘2008-06-01′ and transdate < ‘2008-07-01′

The above statement displays amount spent on different categories for the month of June 2008 i.e. between 1st June and 30th June (both inclusive).  You may need to replace the dates i.e. ‘2008-06-01′ and ‘2008-07-01′ as per your requirement.

To execute this statement, select ‘Custom SQL Report’ from the ‘Reports’ menu on the Money Manager. If you cannot see ‘Custom SQL Report’ option, you may need to expend the Reports section by clicking on the ‘+’ sign.

Selecting the ‘Custom SQL Report’ will open a ‘Custom SQL Dialog’ box that will ask you to type the query. Copy and paste above statement into the white box and click on the Run Query. It will show your desired report.

If you have any problem running the query, please let me know through comments of this post.

If you need any specific query for your requirement, please put your requirement in the comments and I will be happy to help you out.

Note: In future, I will be writing more SQL queries for MME. If you are interested in these queries, please subscribe the RSS.

Related Post:
Money Manager Ex – Described

43 Things Tags: Money Manage Ex,Personal Finance,Personal Fianance Software,Yanesh Tyagi

visit http://yaneshtyagi.com for more details.

(c) Yanesh Tyagi.

Money Manager EX – The Personal Money Manager

Since long time, I was wondering where my money goes. I always run out of budget at the end of every month. And I could not track where all my money goes. So I decided to use a personal money manager. After some Googling, I found a wonderful software called Money Manager Ex. This is a lightweight personal money manager software which is available free of cost.

Features

Money Manager provides some nice features. Below is the summary of the features, I like.

Multiple Bank Account: You can manage multiple bank accounts. It supports two type of accounts – saving/checking and investment. Your investment accounts automatically becomes stock accounts. But it would be nice if I could get third account type – credit account, for my credit cards. However, you can manage credit cards by pretending them to be saving account and entering the opening balance (i.e. outstanding amount) in negative.

Transactions: With Monery Manager Ex, you can enter tentative transactions. I enterd tentative transactions for the month in advance. Then you can categorize the transactions as reconciled, void or follow up.

Repeated Transactions: You can enter repeated transactions and set the frequency, date etc. This saves lots of data entry time.

Transaction Splitting: This is a very useful feature of Money Manager. You can split a transaction in multiple transactions. I enter a lum sump amount at the beginning of the month for home needs. Later on I can split this transaction into different categories. This helps me to manage my budget and always provides me a birds eye view of my finance.

Budgeting: This software allows you to enter budget for a year. Later on you can compare budget with the actual expenses.

Reports: Money Manager Ex provides a handful of useful reports. Some of the reports, I use are:

Where The Money Goes
To Whom The Money Goes
Where The Money Comes From
Budget Performance
Income vs Expenses

Custom Reports: If you are not satisfied with the reports provided with the software, you can use custome SQL reports. This allows you to write SQL statement to generate the report. This is a very noice feature for a developer like me.

Database: Money Manager uses SQLlite database. You can do anything with the database using any SQlite tool like SQLite2008 Pro Enterprise Manager or SQLite 3 Explorer.

Carry Your Money Manager With You

The best feature of the Money Manager is that you can carry it with you. The software is very carefully designed not to use any windows dependency like windows registry or any thing else. You don’t need to install the software on your machine. Keep the software in a pen drive and use it any where, at home or on your office laptop or in a cyber cafe etc.

Related Posts:
Money Manager Ex – SQL Query: to create category-wise expense report.

Need any help on using money manager? Put a comment and I will be happy to help you out.

visit http://yaneshtyagi.com for more details.

(c) Yanesh Tyagi.