commuter said:
I need a spreadsheet to help calculate what the interest
cost and remaining balance of a mortgage would be after
a certain period (similar to an amortization table). Available
templates do not offer the option to enter my own payment
and the frequency of the payment i.e. monthly, bi-weekly or
weekly. I need to be able to enter my own payment amount
and the frequency 12,24,26,52
There are several different problems to solve:
1. Computing the required payment and estimating the
number of payments.
2. Generating the appropriate column of payment dates.
3. Generating the rest of the amortization table.
You only ask about #2 and #3.
Once you have #2 (see below), #3 is quite easy. It is the
same in all cases. If A:A is the date, B:B is the payment,
C:C is the prinicipal paid in the period, D

is the interest
paid in the period, E:E is the remaining balance, then set
A1 and E1 to the date and amount of the initial loan, enter
the following formulas and copy down:
C2: =B2-D2
D2: =D1*(1+rate/365)^(A2-A1)
E2: =D1+D2-B2
where "rate" is the nominal annual interest rate; "rate" might
be a cell reference. This assumes that loans compound daily.
Alternatively, ignoring daily compounding, you might replace
D2 with simply D1*(1+rate/freq), where "freq" is 12, 24, 26 or
52 (or a cell reference).
#2 can be more difficult, namely: generating the dates in
A:A in a general manner. I would suggest entering the first
two dates into A1 and A2, then entering the following formula
into A3 and copying down:
=if (or(freq=12, freq=24), date(year(A1), 1+month(A1), day(A1)),
A1+14)
where "freq" is the number 12, 24, 26 or 52; "freq" might be
a cell reference. If "freq" is 12 or 24, we want payments on
the same day one month apart every other payment. If "freq"
is 26 or 52, we want payments 14 days apart every other
payment. By entering the first two dates, this computes
monthly and weekly payment schedules, even though the logic
seems to only compute bimonthly and biweekly schedules.
#1 can be the most difficult, if only because lender policy
usually differs from mathematical reality. That is, the way
that lenders compute the payment does not conform to the
mathematical-correct formula to reduce the loan balance to
zero in the prescribed number of payments, taking daily
compounding into account. I believe the following conforms
to what most US lenders do:
=pmt(rate/freq, n, -loan)
where "n" is the number of payments (nominally term*freq,
where "term" is in years) and "loan" is the initial loan amount.
A more mathematically-correct formula would be (for the US):
=pmt(fv(rate/365, 365/freq,, -1) - 1, n, -loan)
Note that even that formula is not mathematically correct
because no payment period has exactly 365/freq days.
NPER() can be used to estimate the number of payments,
given the payment amount and the periodic rate computed
by one of the methods above, namely fv(rate/freq,...)-1 or
rate/freq.