Financial calculators

I need to head over to Niemann-Marcus and pick up a green eyeshade. Seems like I'm spending most of the day either daydreaming about my new home or trying to figure out whether I can afford it. The considerations are: I love the weather and the soccer and the prices in Spain (yes, those outlandish prices are relatively affordable) but I love the language and the soccer in England. Should be an easy choice, I suppose, but the language matters to me.

And so does the money. Not in the really visceral way that it probably should matter to me (i.e., so that I'll have enough to eat). Rather, it matters in the same adrenalin-inducing, exhilirating way that a soccer game matters to me. I want to win. It sounds lame (very lame) to say so, but I think that Jerry and I have always enjoyed collaborating on money projects for this reason. We like to play on the same team.

In fact, I've become something of a connoisseur of financial calculators. The online competition in this space is actually amazing, and the variety of different calculators is endless. Jerry prefers to wrestle with Excel for a couple of hours, while I spend my hours on Google checking out the calculators.

CreditProvide is a great example of a site with an almost endless variety of calculators, from mortgage refinance calculators to simple loan calculators to payday loan calculator. This site also has a great education center that has helped me to understand mortgage refinancing. Part of the plan here is to refinance our first home in order to help afford our second. Is this a bad plan? Perhaps the education center (or your comments!) can help me. Has anybody tried this? Experiences? What about buying property abroad? I know so many folks with second homes here, but none with second homes abroad (save one friend with a flat in Hong Kong).

Link: payday loan calculator