Ever wonder what kind of voodoo is happening when your car salesman refers you to the finance department, or when your mortgage loan broker disappears into a back room to prepare your estimates? Now you can double-check their work and propose alternate solutions yourself using Loan Analyzer, a touch screen app for S60 5th Edition devices from Lakshmi Solutions LLC, a company that named itself after the Hindu goddess of wealth and other good things.

I admit, it took me a few minutes to get the hang of the application, but once I understood the iterative nature of its operation, it was easy to do everything that the instructions said. That includes calculating a loan amount based upon a given interest rate, payment amount, and payment frequency, or changing any one of the variables and having the application recalculate any one of the other variables.

Calculating loan amount from payment and interest.

For example, here I checked on what amount of car loan I could get if I paid $500 per month for 5 years at 4.7% interest rate. I entered those variables and then clicked on the button labeled Loan Amount, and the figure 26689.30 was filled in by the application. It does not assign a currency to the field, because the underlying math is the same whether one is talking about dollars, euros or any other currency.

It is more often the case that one knows the loan amount and wants to calculate the monthly payment, so one does that by filling in the other fields, and then clicking on the Payment button. For other types of loans, one can also fill in payment frequencies of daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannually, or annually. The length of the contract can also be expressed in years, months, weeks or days.

Once the basic fields are filled out one can make changes, such as reducing the number of months of the contract from 60 to 36, and then clicking on the payment button to see how that boosts the monthly payment.

With the basic parameters filled out on the loan tab, one can switch to the Analysis tab to see some of the details. This shows the alternative of an interest-only loan payment, which of course presents a much lower periodic payment.

Analysis tab shows interest-only information and early payoff info.

If one clicks on the Periods button, you can enter an early final payment date and see what the payoff amount would be to finish the loan at that point, and how much interest you will have paid complete the contract.

Early payment data.

Then there is the Table tab, which shows you the payment-by-payment balances.

Table tab

In the default view, you see the breakdown of principal and interest for each payment. One can also see the Total Principal and Total Interest paid at each step by clicking on the Cumulative button, or see the Total Principal and Loan Balance at each step by clicking on the Balance button.

Overall, this app does exactly what it claims to do, and can be a handy utility in negotiations for a new car, house, or other major item. The touch screen features worked as expected, and the only minor annoyance I found was that the layout of the loan screens are best viewed in portrait mode, yet I needed to use the keyboard on my Nokia N97 to enter the data, and that puts the screens in landscape mode. In landscape mode, some of the information (such as the Reset button on the Loan screen and the early payment information on the Analysis screen) fall below the fold and must be scrolled to be seen. What I found myself doing was entering the data in landscape mode, and then closing the keyboard to view a full picture in portrait mode.

Loan Analyzer is available for S60 5th Edition devices on Ovi Store and can be downloaded here. It is priced at $1.99.