How do I prevent the calculator from changing the Payment Amount when I am trying to compute the Number of Regular Payments?
The calculator only wants to work with an integer number of payments. Sometimes, the Payment Amount you enter may result in a non-integer number of payments. In such a case, the calculator rounds the Number of Regular Payments to the nearest integer, and then re-calculates what the Payment Amount should be under these altered conditions. If this is not the behavior you want, then the calculator can be coerced into doing it your way. Let’s assume that you borrow $5000 from your great-grandmother at 8% (you want to be fair, afterall). You want to make payments of $250 monthly. How long will it take to pay off? You enter the parameters into the calculator, and it tells you that the loan can be paid off in 22months, but that you will only pay $245.10 per month. For some reason, this is unacceptable (perhaps because it does not quite cover great-grandma’s $250 monthly bingo habit), so you invoke the Balloon Payment field to handle the left-overs: subtract one from the Number of Regular Paym
