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๐Ÿ’ฐ Finance

Loan, depreciation, energy and fuel savings calculators

Money calculations where seeing the working matters more than getting a number. Loan repayments, compound growth, salary conversions, running costs, and the everyday arithmetic of whether one price is really better than another.

These are informational tools, not advice. They are useful for understanding the shape of a decision โ€” how much of a payment is interest, what a rate change does over twenty years โ€” and they are not a substitute for the figures your lender, employer or tax authority gives you.

Which tool do I want?

If youโ€ฆUse
You want repayments and total interest on a loanLoan Calculator
You are projecting savings or investment growthCompound Interest Calculator
You need to compare an hourly rate to an annual salarySalary Calculator
You are working out take-home payPaycheck Calculator
Two package sizes and you want the real unit priceUnit Price Calculator
You want the running cost of an appliance or serverEnergy Cost
You are checking what a discount actually savesDiscount Comparison
You are planning monthly spendingBudget Planner

Compounding frequency changes the answer more than people expect

A "5% annual rate" is not one number. Compounded once a year it returns exactly 5%. Compounded monthly the effective rate is 5.12%; daily, 5.13%. Small differences โ€” until you run them over decades, where they separate meaningfully.

This is why regulators require lenders to quote an effective annual rate alongside the nominal one. The nominal rate tells you what gets applied per period; the effective rate tells you what actually happens over a year, and only the second is comparable between products.

Worth knowing in the other direction too: on a long mortgage, the early payments are overwhelmingly interest, because interest is charged on the balance and the balance has barely moved. That is also why overpaying early is far more effective than overpaying late โ€” every extra unit removes a balance that would otherwise have accrued interest for the entire remaining term.