Excel help, please!

[kellia]

Help! I have Excel worksheets I made with formulas set up using PMT to figure out payments if we were to finance something using various months and interest rates. However, I cannot figure out how to put in an amount we owe (like a credit card) and figure out how soon it would be paid off if we paid so much a month or how much we'd have to pay to get it paid off in a certain time period. Can anyone help me? I think it's using the FV, but I didn't retain anything from my college finance class!!

 

[dawnball]

To pay it off in a certain period of time you can do something like:

=-pmt(APR/12, num_payments,amount owed)

If you want to see how quickly you would pay something off with a given payment you can use NPER
=NPER(APR/12,payment,-principle)

 

[sbakersub]

I use Excel quite a bit on my job, but for those kind of personal finance questions I cheat and use one of the options on this web site...

www.timevalue.com/tcalc.aspx