Calculate Your Car Payments

I have to admit, I am a Function Junkie, and let’s say it is time to trash the Nerdmobile and buy a new car. Well, no self-respecting Excel Guru is going into a car dealer without his or her trusty laptop or Excel-compatible tablet loaded with the most recent version of Excel.

And why do I want to bring my computer you say, (besides just to look cool)? To Calculate the Monthly Car Payments, of course! Here is how:

The Excel PMT function can calculate the monthly repayment using the following format:

PMT(AnnualInterestRate/12, NumberOfPayments, AmountOfLoan)

For example, if your annual interest rate is 4%, on a 5-year (60 months) loan of $30,000, your formula would look like this:

=-PMT(0.04%,60,30000)

Note that a negative sign (-) was placed in front of the function in order to return a positive value (negative payment values just don’t look cool…)

With your formula in place, hit Enter and, Bam!, you have your monthly payment. If you don’t like the results, play around with the interest rate, the length of the loan, or maybe check out some cheaper cars.  How cool is that!