Roast: Mortgage Calculator for Google Sheets

About this Tutorial

Reviewing an existing sheet called "mortgage calculator for Google sheets" I point out the really nice "back to dashboard" button. This seems like a minor point but ends up improving the user interface, and user experience. Users tend to get lost in sheets with tabs, and providing another path to a sheet you know your users will want to go to, is great. At the end of the video I point out that you probably want to provide more outputs than inputs. Meaning that if someone puts in a few numbers, they get out of it a few years of statistics, or calculations in this case. Calculators are cool, but generators are even better. Calculators have a tendency to have more inputs than outputs. You're trying to get to one magical result. But a spreadsheet can be so much more powerful and show many more outputs if you do those calculations,. Especially here for a mortgage, you can show a range of calculations in addition to a single calculation.

Video Transcript

00:00 We are almost done with our coffee. So this next sheet is a mortgage calculator for Google sheets. It's by Alejandro.
00:08 It is available right now on Gumroad. Um, Alejandro is here, um, and it is available for free. I think our name, a fair price, uh, not free you name a price.
00:23 Um, go get it. It's four calculators in one. Um, so Alejandro here's your roast? Uh, the roasted beans are almost done.
00:34 Um, and it's really cool. So I really liked the design of this. I think it's funky. I think it really screams, like I'm not a Google sheet, even though I am, um, the color, it really reads nicely.
00:48 I think, um, you could even increase the font a little bit, um, right away. This text here is how many is that one sentence?
01:01 I mean, like, I dunno in bullet points or something, it was hard to read right away. Um, but also I wonder like a user is getting this after they bought it or bought it on Gumroad.
01:14 So, um, I really liked that you repeat like all of the use cases here and have the different calculators like links.
01:23 Um, I showed this in my guide to, um, make in Google sheets, uh, for fun and profit. This is a really cool thing.
01:31 You can create internal Google sheet, uh, links. Okay. Link over. Let's see how it works. If it works, my internet is so slow.
01:44 There it goes. Great. So we're on the first one month. What's the monthly payment. So now Kara is something I was playing with this a little bit before.
01:52 Um, how is this different than just, I literally went to Google and I typed calculate mortgage payment. And here's a calculator on Google itself.
02:03 If I don't need to get a Google sheet, I don't need to go to your sheet. I can just type in the mortgage amount interest rate period.
02:09 And here's my payment. Let's add a zero and let's let's compare. Let's see if this is actually is, do these numbers come up the same.
02:19 So price is 1 million down payment, 200,000, 30 years, 2.5%. Let's go do that. So I have 1 million mortgage, 30 years, 2.5 and 3, 9 51, but I have no place here to put in down payment.
02:41 That's interesting. That is interesting. So I do have in this Google sheet, the ability to put in a down payment.
02:50 So let's just say this is zero, um, for now. So that's three one. Oh, Nope. It's not it's loading. Give it some time.
03:01 Give it some time. Yeah. Nice. 3, 9, 5 of that loading time makes it feel like this really matters. Like, that's fine.
03:10 If it worked immediately, I be like, oh, I can just keep changing. But like, now that it literally took a little time, like, okay, let me think about it a little.
03:18 Okay. 3 9, 5, 1 20 cents 3, 9, 5 damn straight on bang. Okay. Simple calculation. But in this sheet you can add that you have a down payment.
03:30 It's really cool. Um, here's one thing I would add the once. I mean, so I think, I don't know. So I would want to see like, how does, so I click here, right?
03:48 I'm just adding two 20,000 kind of loads. This, I wonder if you could create, is this here? The mortgage comparison?
03:58 Is this the answer? I wonder if I want to compare it? What is the difference? Yes. Oh, this is good.
04:06 So how do different mortgages compare against each other? What is the ultimate price I'll pay? If I, if I change my down payment, keep the home price the same, keep the principle, keep the loan here as the same and just change the down payment.
04:19 I can do that here. That's cool. That's really cool. So I would be here's my monthly payment. Here's how it's going to change.
04:25 Here's how the total interest paid. I would add, um, in here the total amount. So if I want a $500,000 home, what is the total amount I'll pay?
04:36 Not just so it'd be interest plus the payment interest paid principal, right? Um, so five or down payment plus principal plus total interest paid will be what's the total.
04:50 I'm not in pain. Show me that. I would also say if you know, that people are going to be comparing, do the comparison for them actually like, okay, so you have this sheet.
05:05 I would add another sheet of fifth calculator and say, compare a versus B. So take these like this list and then create a dropdown that you can choose these here.
05:18 That would be really cool. And then you can say, compare a to B and see the actual difference. If I'm changing my downpayment two, um, I want to double my down payment.
05:31 Total interest paid is going to be different, right? It's only changing my total interest by $6,000. It looks like that's it.
05:40 So I, if, if I pay it an extra one, if I double my down payment right now, same home price, same interest.
05:47 Nope. It's not the same interest rate on my loan. Let's do two. Okay. That's interesting. Um, save $20,000. That's really good.
05:58 Okay. That's good to know. Right. If I double my down payment, I'm going to say I'm really saving 20,000. So I'm actually paying more now, but really only like 80 K more like, cause I'm going to save that 20.
06:12 I'm never going to have to pay that 20 day extra. Um, so it's really like 80 K more to get a lower and also a lower monthly payment by 600 bucks, like man, 600 bucks.
06:26 I think that this is going to be around 20 gap area. That's where you save the money. Um, but like what if I only two, one C so an extra 20,000 will save me 4,000.
06:43 Great, nice. Um, this is really cool. Let's see the whole price calculator. Oh, I really like the back, the dashboard button.
06:56 That's good. That's good. Um, one thing I would say is make it much clear that make it much clearer. What is an input and what is an output?
07:08 Um, actually like make this a different color and then say, Hey, wherever you see this color put in your number.
07:18 Um, and that's always an extra thing, right? Um, there, there, there should be some stylistic change like a border, um, because some people are color blind.
07:30 Also some people have different screens. Like, um, I do a lot of work without the blue light as if it's like nighttime mode.
07:39 Um, so I won't see certain colors or certain shades of colors and certain differences. So you'll want to like do different primary colors or, but also block it off, like put a nice little border on it and be like, anytime you see this, see this color, see this border.
07:57 That's where you put in your information also around calculators. I think a normal calculator is that you have a number of inputs, like say we're doing addition, simple calculator, uh, number one, number two, add those together.
08:17 You get a third number, right? One plus two equals three. And so we're having more inputs than outputs. We have one output from a number of inputs, I would say to really feel like there's an extra value here to feel like we're getting something that's mind boggling and really good and like shareable, right?
08:36 Like you want more outputs than inputs. So right now, um, or more ways to change the, the numbers, um, or to see comparisons, right.
08:50 Uh, comparison is good. We want to see more than one comparison want, we don't want just the Delta. We want Delta.
08:58 We want like maybe, okay, so here's one way. So you have a mortgage comparison where all the inputs are, are compared to each other.
09:08 What you can do as well is say, input this number one, 1 million, this number, the price put in the dome payment.
09:17 We already tequila in your loan principal. Great. That's one output. We know what your monthly payment is. That's two outputs.
09:23 Um, but we have four inputs, right? We have a 30 year loan, a or an interest rate. So we have four inputs to outputs right now, two more outputs could be take this number 30.
09:37 And if you know that it's going to be like increments of five, do the math and create a nother calculator.
09:44 So this kind of very big hold, like the simple monthly payment, create another one and say, we're going to, um, uh, extrapolate based on your number.
09:55 So actually put in 30 for someone. So the only thing someone needs to put in is 1 million put in the down payment, maybe put in the mortgage interest rate, maybe.
10:05 Um, but we're going to extract, we're going to show you all of these numbers, 31, 25 and twenty fifteen, ten five show just across the graph, put in those numbers for them and get the result.
10:18 So it's a graph of their monthly payments. So show that graph same as the 2.5% do it like increments of 0.2, 5% subtract, subtract, and you can do that easily by adding, I made a copy of this already can add a column.
10:37 Let's do that. It's locked. All right. Ah, you know what I'm talking about, add a column and then just do, don't put in this number again, 1,000,020 or 200,000, keep those as two inputs and then get those outputs across.
10:54 Then what's going on is you have two inputs and then you will have at least five, maybe 10 outputs. You'll have the loan principal, you'll have the monthly payment, but you'll have the monthly payment with differing number of years with different number of mortgage rates.
11:09 Then combine those and do those in different ways. So you might have 12 different outputs, but that would be a really cool step up.
11:15 Right? Get this simple one done. You have it here. Add another one. It's like, Hey, do you want to see a graph of all of these possibilities?
11:23 All that would be really cool. All right. Um, I think that's, I think that's enough. Um, make sure I'm going to do an outro now, so we'll be edited later, but, um, make sure you take a look at the mortgage calculator that Alejandro is building on Gumroad maybe your price, name, a price, get a copy of the spreadsheet, but.