Amortization worksheet

Mortgages are extremely confusing, even the most basic 30 year fixed interest loans. To wade through some of the complexity that the loans here is an excel worksheet that can help generate amortization schedules. Hope all of you who like my Sudoku excel sheet and Kaplan-Meier calculators find this useful!

Amortization Excel Worksheet

The idea is to fill in the values for loan amount and interest rate. The table will suggest a minimum monthly payment for P&I for different terms(not accounting for other costs such as taxes, home insurance, PMI if applicable, etc.) such as 30 year, 25 year, and so on. If you are looking at 30 year mortgages, plug that value in where it says "Monthly P&I".

This will generate your amortization table. For each row, you have a distinct payment. . . and it shows how much interest you have paid, how much you owe, and what percentage of the home equity you own. It also shows the total cost of the house (total principle+interest, if you continue paying at this rate).

The cool thing about the table is that you can modify individual payments. So if you want to pay more than the minimum amount on a given month, you type that in. And the table calculates how it affects your overall payment structure. This is particularly useful because making higher payments earlier during the process can lead to significant savings overall. Trying out different scenario's also gets you a feel for negative amortization. Hopefully this can serve as a tool to help compare different mortgage products in terms of their overall cost and how responsive they are to savings from early payments.

Kaplan-Meier Curves

Continuing with my Excel-spreadsheets that do stuff theme, here is a sheet that helps calculate Kaplan-Meier curves, and does a Log-rank test. There is a web-resource that does it, but lately its ability to generate a Log-rank P-value statistic has been down. So, we had to improvise in our lab to continue calculating these things.

This tool is usually used to calculate the effect of a particular treatment on the mortality of an experimental population, compared to a control group. At least, that's what we use it for in our lab. Hope it helps someone who needs to do these statistics and finds no on-line resource to do it. . .

In other news, I have been spending my time writing. As a result, there isn't much news from my life. And I don't want to blog about progress (or lack thereof) on my thesis. And Anyesha has already written about the cupcakes, the highpoint of last week. So there. More later.

2006, Sudoku and Munich.

Happy New Year everyone!

I pray that I graduate and get a good job and get on with life. That all my friends and family do well and find happiness and contentment. I hope the world at large grows towards a greener, more sustainable, future and that our policies are shaped by more long term self interest. So that we don't see huge weather changes and natural disasters that seemed to bug us through 2005. World peace would be a good idea too. Rule of good liberal laws to make the world less of a dog eat dog place. Basically, best wishes to all. One can hope.

Here is my Excel based Sudoku solving helper file. It completely solves all easy and medium levels puzzles at the Websudoku site, but it does get stuck on the difficult or evil ones. It's an easy way to cheat and get a fast time for the Telegraph Sudoku, where they'll display your name. But I guess that's not ethical. It basically can't do scenarios or anything using higher level logic, when the logic itself begins to get fuzzy. Come to think of it, at that stage I tend to get stumped on the puzzles too. . . maybe if I could figure out how to do them, I could teach my Excel sheet to do the same. Anyway, if people have comments on how to improve it do send me a line.

Saw a bunch of good movies over the holidays. The Squid and the Whale is a touching portrayal of a slightly obnoxious failing writer, his wife, a divorce, and the effect of it all on their two kids. Laura Linney is becoming one of my favourite actresses now, for her roles as silent and complicated women. . .like other intense women like Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. The other really good movie was Spielberg's Munich. It is a fairly violent but thought provoking movie about justice, revenge, and how far one can go to find these things without losing ones self.

In other news, I have (finally) submitted my book chapter. Hopefully it will come out in print soon. Hurrah. Now back to work.