June 9, 2009
As a followup to my last post, here is the spreadsheet I use to calculate how much interest I’ve accrued based on when my payment will be applied. Remember to add in 2-3 business days from when you actually submit your payment online until it goes through.
Put your interest rate in C4. Put the amount of principal you owe after your last payment into cell C5, then put the date your last payment was applied to your account. Once entered, the table below will calculate how much interest has accrued on each date for the next month and half.
For example: Say you have a loan at 6.55% interest, you statement comes on the 26th, and due date is the following 13th, and your minimum payment is $400. Say your last payment was made on 5/26, it gets applied on 5/28, and that payment lowers your principal to $50,200.
Now you’ll know that if you make your next payment on 6/26 when you get your next statement, it would be applied on 6/28, and ~$280 of your payment will go to interst. If, however,you wait to make your payment on 7/11, it gets applied on 7/13, then that same payment will have $416 dollars going towards interest. If you paid the minimum, your principal would actually go up by about $16.
Of course, your next months payment will only start accruing from the 13th, so you could make up some of it the next month, but it’s just good to know exactly where you stand.
OpenOffice: daily-compound-interest-example
Excel: daily-compound-interest-example
This spreadsheet is not exact, but it gets within a couple pennies of what Citibank really charges me. If anyone has any ideas on how to make it better, please leave a comment.
Posted by john under General | Comments (0)
June 3, 2009
My wife has significant student loan debt from her time in law school. Not only was she paying tuition, but she had to pay living expenses to live in NY for three years, all paid for with loans. While I was really starting to track our finances, I began taking a longer look at our loan payments to track exactly how much we owed. It took me weeks to figure out what was going on, and since I bet we’re not the only ones to be confused, I thought I’d try and explain it here to save others some trouble. I’ll try and give the story without using the real numbers, but it will be tough.
We have 4 student loans, all services through Citibank:
- A federal loan, 3.5% fixed, $30,000
- A federal loan, 3.5% fixed, $30,000
- A small private loan, 4.5% variable, $10,000
- A large private consolidation loan, 7.75% fixed, $100,000
The key here that we failed to fully realize, is that all of these loans compound their interest daily, not monthly like all our other loans (mortgage, car, etc..). But more on that later.
The large consolidation loan is relatively new, as we just consolidated last year from variable rate loans from another services to the fixed rate at Citibank.
Citibank has lumped these four loans into two payments. The federal loans are grouped into account “-70″, and the consolidation and smaller private loans are lumped together in into another payment to account “-72″. The minimum payments we’ve been given are (again, made up numbers, but proportional): $250 for account -70, and $800 for -72 ($700 for the consolidation loan)
We’ve been making the minimal payment for the past several months, so imagine my surprise when I went to enter the loan into kmymoney earlier this year, and the principal on our consolidation loan hadn’t gone down, not one penny. Where had our money gone?
Deciphering the Citibank Statements
The first clue as to where the money was going figuring out how to decipher the Citibank bill. Most other bills we get tell us exactly how much we own on the loan, and call it the “balance”. However, Citibank does things differently. They list -two- balances. One labeled “Principal Balance”, and the other is the “Payoff Balance”. Our principal balance was still the full original loan amount. The payoff balance was listed as the “balance if paid on due date”.
Normally, I would think that the payoff balance would be the principal balance plus all the amount of interest gained in the month. $100,000 at 7.75% fixed interest should earn about $645 in a month ((.0775/12))*100.000 = ~$645. But our payoff balance was higher, somewhere around $101,000. That wasn’t right. Several calls to citibank later, and we finally figured out what happened.
First, understand this: No where on Citibank’s statement do you find the exact amount (principal + interest) that you owe. They say this is because interest is compounded daily, and so the actual amount you owe changes each day. I don’t see why they can’t just say “as of this date, this is what you owe”, but whatever. So, instead, they give you what you owe on the loan (principal balance) and what you would pay if you paid it off on the due date of the statement (payoff balance = principal + interest accrued this month). Ok…
But the number still weren’t adding up for us.
Citibank drags out sending their initial bill
The other clue, looking at past statements, they showed that our entire payment each month going to interest. That’s odd. Payments should be going towards interest AND principal. But every payment from the start went only to interest.
Our consolidation loan went through on may 31st, 2008. But by the time the check was cashed by the other servicer, and with Citibank shuffling their feet, we didn’t get our first bill until July, and it didn’t get paid until August (when it was due). And therein lies the problem. Our loan has accrued nearly two months of interest, before we made a single payment. I’m not 100% sure this was legal, but whatever.
Since Citibank doesn’t have a spot on their statement that shows how much interest you’ve accrued, the only way this shows up is that the payoff amount is higher than it should be. That’s what happened. We had accrued a lot of extra interest because of the lab between when the loan went through and when the first bill got paid. All of our payments since were going towards paying down that extra accrued interest, which was not clearly spelled out on the statement.
Why did it take us 6 months and we still hadn’t paid off the extra interest?
Citibank’s “minimal payment” is very, very, minimal
The final piece of the puzzle is the minimal payment that Citibank quoted us. It took us a long time to realize what a “minimal” payment means when you talk about daily compound interest. The principal + accrued interest is different depending on not only when you pay your bill, but when you paid your last bill. If you have a $100,000 loan, then every day you’re accruing ~$22 dollars a day ( (0.0775/354)*100000 , and this ignores accrual). Lets say you get your bill on the 20th, and it’s due on the 30th.
If you pay your bill exactly on the 30th, when the next month pay again on the 30th, then you’ve accumulated 30 days worth of interest.
But now lets say the next month you pay when you get the bill on the 20th. Now you’ve only accumulated 20 days of interest, and if you make the same payment it’ll go a lot further (more of the payment goes to principal, not interest). But if the next month, you pay on the 30th again, then you’ve now accumulated 40 days worth of interest.
Citibanks minimal payment, as far as I can tell, is tuned for a little less 30 days between payments, and a tiny bit towards principal above that. So if you pay irregularly, and some months pay at a larger interval (40 months), your minimal payment will not be enough to cover the amount of accrued interest. In other words, you can make your “minimal payment”, and still have the amount you owe go up.
Over the life of the loan, most long months will be balanced out by a short months, but it’s still quite a shocker wen you’re used to dealing with monthly interest accrual where you you can make your payment anytime within the payment window and be guaranteed how much goes to interest versus principal.
In my mind, the minimal payment should be the minimum needed to guarantee that no matter when you make the payment, your payment goes down. But that’s not the case.
Spreadsheet
After gathering all the information, I’ve created a spreadsheet in openoffice which takes the current balance of the loan, the interest rate, and the date the last payment was credited to the account, and returns how much interest has accrued for each day (including accrual). It’s not exact, but it gets within a buck or two what really happens on the loan, so it’s pretty close. If people want, I’ll clean it up (and clear out my real loan data) and post it here. With it, you can tell if you minimum payment will really be enough to cover the interest you’ve accrued since your last statement.
Conclusion
So, I finally have a handle on how the loans work. It’s very confusing, and Citibank seems to be going out of its way to make things confusing, but you can get through it. I’ve upped our payment and now we pay much more than the minimum and are taking decent chunks out of this loan with each payment. We’re still a long way from paying it off, but at least now we understand what’s going on.
Posted by john under General | Comments (6)
June 3, 2009
Several months ago, I wrote my Free Online Finance Trackers post, and I thought I was time for a followup. After several months, the winner was……
None of them.
But it’s not really their fault. I simply decided I needed a little bit more than any of them could provide. I wanted to track retirement plans, budget, loan payments, and paychecks, and not only find out where my money was going, but predict where it would be in the future. Combine that with the fact that I use small credit unions so I have to manually upload transactions anyway, and none of the options really fit my needs. Besides, I always felt squeemish about putting all my financial data online. Yes, I know these companies are all very sensitive to privacy, and I think they do a good job. I simply decided the risk factor was a bit too high for me after all.
Of all the online finance trackers, the one I used the longest was Wesabe. I spent a few months working with it. I think for a someone whose finances aren’t as complicated as ours, it would be a good fit. The few bugs I encountered the tech support was great and easy to work with. I did hit one bug however that they couldn’t seem to fix, involving their javascript graphs not taking into account all of my data (but only when viewed from my computer, when looked at it locally, it worked fine). They worked on it while, but when they still couldn’t fix it, I eventually gave up.
So what do I do now? I gave KMyMoney another spin, and settled on that. GNUCash is still too complicated for me. KMyMoney is set up to track every penny we spend now, and its working out pretty well. The graphing functions are a little cumbersome, and not as pretty as Mint or Wesabe, but they get the job done. I can import all of our finances, including retirement funds, and use several different algorithms to predict how much money we’ll have in the future. The loan feature keeps track of our monthly payments and how much interest we pay.
Now that I’ve taken the time to use a full financial software package, I can’t ever imagine going back to something like Wesabe. It’s just not powerful enough for what I need, nor is it designed to be. For people who just want to track a few accounts, like checking and credit accounts, it’s great. For someone trying to get a handle on all the complicated finances of the household, take the time to learn a full package.
And before anyone asks, yes you can easily run KMyMoney on a Gnome or XFCE desktop, you just need to install the necessary KDE libraries.
Posted by john under General | Comments (0)
June 2, 2009
So it looks like I did my usual post-for-a-while-then-disappear-for-a-few-months trick. I should really stop that at some point. So, I’m back now and resurrecting the blog. I’ve had several posts that I’ve been meaning to write for a while so there will be a few posts all in a row now.
First though, to catch up on my life. As of January, I left my old company (StackSafe) and took a position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. A few weeks after I left, StackSafe went under. So there have been a lot of changes all at once. JHU/APL is locating 5 minutes from my house, so my commute drops from 1+ hours one way, to 10 minutes one way. I get 6 hours of my life back a week (StackSafe was letting me work from home two days a week). It makes a big difference. JHU/APL will also allow me to go to graduate school part time, which is what I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time.
In addition to that, Katy and I are expecting our first kid in early september, so there’s lot of preparations there as well. It’s unreal.
So there’s no lack of excitement going on, and that’s part of the reason I’ve been neglectful of the blog. I’m sure you readers understand. Both of you.
Posted by john under General | Comments (0)
November 14, 2008
I think I’m suffering from entrepreneurial-wannabe syndrome.
What is entrepreneurial-wannabe syndrome? It’s an affliction that targets people (mostly engineers, and engineers-at-heart) that starts with them getting a cool idea to solve a problem and ends with crushing psychological defeat. The progression of the disease goes something like this:
- Identify a problem: “Gosh, it really would be nice if I could do X with widget Y”.
- Think of a solution: “Hey, you know, you could add Z to widget Y to do X, let me google and see if someone’s already done it.”. Healthy, normal people stop here.
- Start actually designing a solution: “Well, part Z could be crafted such that it fits into widget Y like so…”. Healthy engineers stop here.
- Image turning solution into a real business: “Hey, I could make Z. It wouldn’t be THAT hard, and maybe I can make a little money on the side.”. Danger zone.
- Actually researching patents: “Dude! no one’s patented Z yet!”. Real danger. Have a beer. You just didn’t look hard enough.
- Start building your prototype: “Hey, hand me that wrench”. See, now you’re wasting real time and resources on this, you need help.
- Think seriously about a business plan, and try and sell your friends on the idea: “..and you could sell it through a channel, the the total number of employees would stay low…”. Stop. Just.. stop.
- Discover that company A already came up with your idea and it’s been on the market for B number of years, you just didn’t find it: “*thunk*, *thunk*, *thunk*”. That’s the sound of your head hitting the table over and over again because you realize your actually thought you had a unique idea that could make you a) a little bit or b) a lot of money (choose a) or b) depending on the severity of the affliction). You realise you’ll be at your normal job, and not in some cushy CTO’s chair for the foreseeable future.
Why do I write about this? Because it’s happened to me twice in the past three months. I got it bad. Best cure I’ve found? Beer. And I’m not even a big drinker.
Want to hear the ideas? Well, I could explain them all to you, but it would probably be easier to just link to the websites of the companies that already do pretty much exactly what I envisioned. Congrats to them for having the ideas and executing on them. I guess I could take some solace in the fact that both companies were founded in 2007, so I’m only a year behind the truly creative people. But, well.. I think I need another beer.
Idea-Already-Done #1: Thinking about the Chevy Volt and the how I liked the idea of a plugin-hybrid in general, I realised my lack of a garage would mean I’d need some sort of safe and secure outside outlet next to my driveway or on my street. Put it behind a cipher or RFID lock keyed to a fob on your key chain. Add some monitoring to the outlet, and you can measure how much you’re spending. Then scale the idea up, and sell charging stations with metered output to office and apartment buildings, where managers could charge their tenants for the amount used. Hook it up to a charge card reader and sell it to parking garages to have people pay there. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this already? Would have to move fast though, because the Volt’s due on 2010…
…Of course, the Tesla Roadster’s here now, which is why a former employee of theirs got together with some silicon valley veterans and started CoulombTech, which does pretty much exactly what I just described. Founded 2007.
Idea-Already-Done #2: Much less ambitious. I wanted a simple way to play chess with my dad and/or friends online. So why not a simple, chess focussed web site site with some AJAX boards and play-by-email options? Throw in some simple tournaments and peer rankings, some GNUChess-backed AI, and put a few simple ads, and you have a niche product that could attract a loyal following. Keep the interface clean and simple so you don’t scare off older players. It could be fun to build. It would never make millions but might provide a bit of extra spending cash…
…for the makers of Chess.com, Founded 2007
On the bright side, I now know a little more javascript then I did, and a lot more about 1960’s era patents on outdoor lockable power outlet covers, and ammeters.
Maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll come up with an idea that hasn’t already been thought of. And that, I think, it symptom #9: Not giving up. Maybe a social networking site of business plan ideas…. wait, someone pass me a beer.
Anyone have their own entrepreneurial-wannabe experiences to share?
Posted by john under General | Comments (3)
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