Using Financial Calculators to Help Your Personal Finances

The internet offers many tools to help you get a better grip on your personal finances, and one of these most helpful tools come in the form of calculators. These calculators will help you figure out everything from your 401(k) to your net worth.

The Internet has brought a host of applications to help consumers track and manage their personal finances. One of the most important? Online financial calculators.

The Web today is home to financial calculators of all kinds: You can use them to determine how much you’ll pay each month for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loan at 6 percent interest. You can find a calculator that will tell you how long it’ll take you to pay off your credit card debt if you only make your minimum monthly required payment each month. The Internet has calculators that will help you determine how much money you’ll have to sock away each month to prepare for retirements and how much you’ll have to save to help your children make it through their college education.

Some of the most important online calculators are those that tell you how long it’ll take you to erase your credit card debt depending upon how much you pay each month. You simply enter the amount of your credit card debt, the interest rate attached to that debt and the amount of money you plan to pay each month. These calculators can also tell you how much interest you can save by paying off your credit card debt earlier. And if you’re struggling to tackle that debt, there are online financial calculators that will set up a credit card debt repayment schedule for you.

Making a major purchase, such as buying a car or house, can be a frightening experience. But it won’t be as overwhelming if you know exactly how much you’ll be paying each month. Fortunately, the Internet is dotted with high-quality financial loan calculators that can quickly determine the size of your monthly auto or mortgage payment.

When you find one of these calculators, you simply enter the loan amount, the interest rate attached to that amount and the number of years the loan will last. The calculator then determines how much you’ll pay each month. This will quickly give you a good idea of whether you can afford this new loan.

Online financial calculators can help you better plan for your retirement years, too. For instance, there are several spending-vs.-saving calculators online. For these calculators, you enter how much you spend on a particular activity each month, whether it be eating out, going to the movies or traveling. The calculator will then tell you how much you’d save each year by cutting out this spending and how much this amount would be worth by the time you retire if you invested it.

As an example, if you’re 30 and you spend $50 a month eating out, you’d save $600 a year. If you’d invested this amount instead, after 10 years you would have earned $7,734 after paying income taxes. If you would have invested this money in a tax-deferred retirement account, you would have earned $107,818 by retirement.

Retirement choices aren’t easy, of course. That’s why consumers can turn to online calculators that tell them how much money they’ll earn by investing in Roth vs. traditional IRAs. Other online calculators will determine the true cost of borrowing from your 401(k) account, while still others will tell you whether it makes more sense to save money or use that money to pay down debt.

And if you still have some free time in your day, you can access a net worth calculator that will factor your debts and assets and tell you exactly how much you’re worth. If you’re shopping for a home, you can find online calculators that help you make the financial decision between a fixed-rate mortgage loan and an adjustable-rate loan.