Free apps to do your money math

Financial planning may not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially when complex formulae and calculations are involved. Whether it is comparing options for refinancing a home loan or trying to deduce how much you need to save each month for retirement, there’s no way to avoid the math.

Unless, of course, you have someone else to do it for you. For the rest, a plethora of applications are available for free on the internet. Here are a few good ones.

Unsure about whether you can get a better interest rate on your home loan?

Try out one of the home loan refinance calculators available for free on the internet. Bankbazaar.com offers one such handy app that gives a graphic representation of your current monthly instalment payments vis-à-vis the EMI you’d have to pay if you transferred your loan account.

You have to key in details such as your outstanding loan amount, current EMI, number of EMIs remaining, and pre-payment charges on foreclosure of existing loan.

Other details required are the processing fee being charged by the new loan provider, new interest rate and tenure of the new loan. The application then makes a recommendation on whether you should switch loans, besides a summary of how much money you’ll save or lose. There are other applications offered by websites such as moneyleo.com and rupeetalk.com , besides the EMI calculator on HSBC’s web page.

Planning for your retirement ensures that you don’t need to rely on your children or anyone else to make ends meet.

So, how much do you need to save each month? What will your current investments be worth when you retire?

What’s the shortfall in your projected retirement corpus vis-à-vis your goals?

Using a mix of applications available on the internet seems like the best way to successfully chart out your retirement plan, given that the different retirement calculators available often provide different insights on how best to plan for those golden years ahead of you.

Royal Bank of Scotland’s retirement calculator offers a good start; you should also look at Franklin Templeton’s retirement planner, ICICI Bank’s retirement planning tool and Principal Retirement Advisors’ savings calculator. The websites all ask for information on your retirement goals and current savings to determine an appropriate strategy for you.

Knowing how much to save isn’t enough, though. Where do you invest? That choice depends on how much risk you can take.

So, can you stomach the volatility in the stock market? Or do the swings make you shiver and anxious to protect your principal?

Among the more interesting calculators on the internet are the risk appetite calculators of financial service providers such as ICICI Bank, RBS and HDFC Life.

A risk calculator helps in establishing your financial risk-taking capacity as well as your psychological risk-tolerance level.

The level of risk you can take is assessed on the basis of your responses to a short survey that evaluates various aspects of your approach towards investment and risk capacity.

In the case of the RBS calculator, you’re also provided with an appropriate asset allocation strategy once you complete the survey. But be warned: the calculators may differ on your risk appetite.

Those savings, those home loans — how do they impact your taxes? There’s one authentic calculator for determining your income tax liabilities for the year. And that’s the one on the Income Tax Department’s official website.

The calculator is available in two versions: a simple one for those with a single source of income and a more advanced one for individuals with more than one income stream.

Choose the tax year for which you seek to generate your tax liability and then use the drop down menus to select the appropriate tax category (male/female/senior citizen) and whether you are a resident, non-resident or not ordinary resident of the country.

While the simple tax calculator only requires you to provide your net taxable income, the advanced calculator asks for information on your income from property, capital gains, business profits, and even lottery winnings, among other details.

Once you’re done, the website displays your total tax liability, including a break-up of income tax, surcharge and cess.

While this calculator is very reliable, the others mentioned above can vary, especially those that calculate risk.

Use the calculator as a thumb rule for investment, rather than as gospel truth.

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