These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Jensen Budget

Stephen Jensen

Executive Summary

For my personal project I decided to work on my personal budget. I designed this project to help alleviate two pain points I have, first categorizing my spending and second analyzing home and car loans.

Keeping a budget is something that I take very seriously. I really try to keep track of where I am spending money and for areas where I can save. To track my spending, I use a VBA code to categorize each transaction I make. In the past, I would spend three to four hours a month manually entering each transaction into each designated category. Needless to say this process is tedious and frustrating.

Along with tracking my spending, I am also concerned about getting a car loan and home loan. I currently have a car loan and will be looking to get a home loan in the next two to three years. Being able to quickly crunch the numbers for different loan amounts, down payments, interest rates, and terms is something that I would find very useful now and in the future. I also am very interested to see how much interest I will save over the life of the loan by making extra payments each month on my loan.

The first part of my system is designed to ease the annoyance of manually categorizing each of my transactions. Now all I need to do is download my credit card transactions from my bank and put them in a sheet in my workbook. Then simply click the button “Input Transactions” and the code will automatically place each transaction in the desired month and category. This code will save me three to four hours each month and allow me to track my spending month to month.

The second part of my system allows me to quickly analyze loans based upon the loan amount, down payment, interest rate, and terms. This system allows me to enter these four inputs and then runs a sensitivity analysis on each input. That is it shows me how the monthly payment and total interest paid varies if each input were to increase or decrease. I also included an amortization schedule based off of those four inputs. The amortization schedule also allows me to enter an extra payment amount, how many months I will make that extra payment and the number of months remaining on the loan then calculates how much interest I will save. This will allow me to analyze loans quickly and intelligently.


This system will be very helpful for me to keep track of my spending and analyze home and car loans.

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14f/jensen48/Jensen_Final_Project.xlsm
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14f/jensen48/Jensen_Final_Write_Up.pdf

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