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Open Thread: How are you using Excel?
Merlin Mann | Aug 22 2006
Yesterday, I mentioned I'd been talking with someone who's looking at interesting things people are doing with Microsoft Excel. I talked to her again yesterday, and with her official okey-dokey, I'll virtually introduce Tralee Pearce (*waves*), a reporter from Toronto's Globe & Mail whom you might remember from a very swell article about the Hipster PDA. So, by request -- and to help Tralee with fleshing out her fun-sounding article -- I hope you all will jump in here: What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What's the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program? 119 Comments
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 Before refinancing my mortgage, I...Submitted by Anthony Renaud (not verified) on August 23, 2006 - 7:59am.
Before refinancing my mortgage, I wanted to figure out the truth of which would lead to lower total interest paid (5yr fixed, quarterly variable, or monthly variable mortgages). I went to the Bank of Canada website which has the Prime rate + the 5 yr fix mortgage rate for each month since 1951. I imported all that data into excel, and then wrote macros which would then start a new $200k 25 year mortgage every month since Jan 1951 till Dec 1979 (the last date I could use to get a full 25 yrs mortgate calculated) and calculated interest paid. I repeated this for 3 types of mortgage approaches - 5yr fixed renewed every 5 years. A variable mortgage with interest rate recaculated quarterly, and than a variable rate mortgage with interest rate recalculated monthly. (had to make assumptions about the relation of the 3month and 1 month variable rates to the Prime rate - assumed same relationship as I could get today) I used this to determine which mortgage actually leads you to paying the least amount interest. Results for those intersted - 1. Variable rate will pay less interest than 5yr fixed in 90% of the mortgages I calculated (with quarterly paying slightly more than monthly variable) 2. If you started your 5yr fixed in July 76', and renewed every 5 yrs - you paid $464k in interest on your $200k mortgage by the time your're done - OUCH! Note: this did not take into account early payment options such as increasing monthly payment, lump sum payments, etc. » POSTED IN:
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