The Fun Part

Spreadsheet time!

Now it was time to build my ammo for buying this car. I created this months before. Assessing how much car I wanted and could afford.

Sheet 1: Interest Calc

There are a lot of auto loan calculators out there. But this is about my familiarity of the system. And who wants to be pulling up a site with a bunch of ads while talking to the Financial person at a dealer?

I made my own calculator in Google Docs that I could access on my phone:

Total Price	$27,700.00
Int rate	1.49%
# of payments	60
Monthly Payment	$479.36
Total paid on Loan	$28,761.82
Interest paid	$1,061.82

There are a lot of ways to calculate these numbers, I used a teaching lesson.  I compared it to the Auto Loan Calculators on other sites. I felt comfortable with the numbers it was giving me.

Next to it I had to make a calculation for 0% interest: (Since dividing by zero is bad.)

Total Price	$27,000.00
Int rate	0%
# of payments	60
Monthly Payment	$450.00
Total paid on Loan	$27,000.00
Interest paid	$0.00

Do this for yourself.

It seems so simple but every part you can put yourself on a familiar footing helps in the process. I had my sheet to look at with numbers in a format I was familiar with, and in dealing with Finance, it helped.