SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom discusses the value of using online financial calculators to make smarter business and personal financial decisions. These are not basic handheld calculators, but interactive online tools that help evaluate loans, mortgages, leases, retirement plans, taxes, and other financial scenarios by adjusting variables such as interest rates, payoff periods, and payment amounts.
Key Points
• Financial calculators help predict outcomes before making major decisions.
• They can compare scenarios like:
o Buying vs. leasing a vehicle
o Paying off a mortgage early
o Loan payment structures
o Retirement savings growth
o Business financing options
Mortgage Example
Tom shares a real-world example involving mortgage prepayments:
• He tested adding an extra $500/month toward a mortgage.
• Result:
o Reduced remaining payments from 147 to 100
o Eliminated 47 payments
o Saved about $78,000 in interest
• After accounting for the extra payments themselves ($23,500), the net savings were roughly $54,500.
He notes that while some financial strategies favor keeping mortgages longer for tax deductions and inflation advantages, he personally prefers reducing debt.
Types of Calculators Mentioned
The online resource he references includes categories such as:
• Retirement calculators
• 401(k) calculators
• Car financing calculators
• Insurance calculators
• Investment calculators
• Personal and business loan calculators
• Mortgage calculators
• Savings calculators
• Tax calculators
• Buy vs. lease calculators
• Working capital calculators
Many categories contain numerous specialized sub-calculators.
Main Takeaway
Using these tools helps people:
• Make informed financial decisions
• Understand long-term costs and savings
• Evaluate business impacts before committing
• Improve personal financial planning
Tom emphasizes that even if someone ultimately chooses a more expensive option, calculators at least allow them to make the choice knowingly instead of guessing.
Privacy Note
He mentions that the calculator site he used did not require logging in, which reduced his concerns about privacy or spam. However, he advises users to be cautious with sites that collect personal data or have invasive terms of service.
Closing
Tom promotes:
• His automation book
• His mentor program
• His online school:
o Great Internet Marketing Training
o IMTCVA.org

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Episode 1128 – Business and Personal Calculators
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1128 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about business and personal calculators. I'm not talking about something in your hand or on your phone where you multiply and divide. I'm talking about things that will evaluate your business with all different parameters that you can type in. So you can see, oh, if I pay my mortgage off early, or if I get this loan at a certain percentage rate, what's my payment going to be? And a whole bunch of other ones that I'll tell you about a little later. All right. Let's see. Hope you didn't miss episode 1127 that was on Zoom notes versus a companion. So these are things that you can use on Zoom to outline meeting notes and take notes and make notes on them and keep track of what you want to talk about and all that's covered on episode 1127. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com/the episode number. Make sure you pick up a copy of my automation book. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. It's saved me literally millions and millions of keystrokes over the years by automating things. And a lot of them are free and cheap right in front of your face. Now, the latest version is 3.0, and the only difference in it is that I talk about shortcut keys, which, as we estimated actually over the years has saved me 10 million keystrokes. And it's now a browser extension instead of a program that you install. So there you go. All right. And check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.
[00:02:16] Okay. It's a really good idea to keep an eye on your finances. No, no, I was going to say .... But I won't. I'll save a profanity for later. All right. Yeah. It's a good idea to keep an eye on your finances, but sometimes it's hard to predict things, how things would go and whether you should do something, whether you shouldn't. You know, let's say you were going to finance a car or lease it. I mean, which is better in the long run for your business and all that kind of those kinds of things that are hard to figure out on your own. So one way to do it is to experiment with online calculators. Now, I put a link in the show notes to a site. Of course, they want to help you and sell you, you know, financial services, but they have a whole boatload of free calculators that you can write online, put in different parameters and and it'll kick out answers for you.
[00:03:16] I'm going to give you a list of them here later, but let me give you an example. So I put some figures in on a mortgage loan. And like I said, you can apply and adjust the figures like the interest rate and the length of the mortgage and all those kinds of things. And in this particular case, I was interested in if I paid it off early, what would I save and which I did on this retreat center years ago, I saved, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest. But but anyway, in this particular case, there was the way it was the way it was now was or then when I was doing this was 147 payments left. And so I said, well, what if I paid $500 extra per month? What would that do to the to my overall situation. And so it ended up it knocked off 47 payments all right, which saved $78,000 in interest. Now let's figure out, okay, what kind of deal this was. I didn't actually save $78,000 because paying $500 extra a month was going to cost me $23,500 over time, you know, at $500 a month. So technically, I saved $54,500 in interest by paying it off early. Now, there is a school of thought that, hey, if you just keep paying it off, you get the mortgage interest deductions and you're paying it off in inflated dollars.
[00:05:09] So yeah, all those have positives. But I like to I don't like the debt, you know, so I did an episode recently on smart debt, debt and dumb dead. All right. So but in general, it's nice to not have anything on your head. So that's just one example. And they have tons of calculators. So I'm just going to rattle off some of them. And each one I tell you has a bunch. It's like a major category. And then there's loads when you click on the category, it's got loads of very specific calculators underneath that you can use for free all online. So one of the categories is a retirement calculator and or retirement calculators. Because when you click on it, there's a whole bunch of very specific ones underneath. Say they have 401 K calculators, car finance, as opposed to leasing that kind of thing, or just without leasing involved, how much you're going to pay over time. Insurance calculators, investment calculators, personal loan versus commercial loan calculators, business loan, mortgage loans, savings calculators, tax calculators. I told you earlier buy versus lease a working capital calculator. So these are things that there's like a hundred. There's probably 100 of them there. But you just go in and pick ones that may apply to you and then click on it.
[00:06:47] And then you just fill in blanks and you can play with it and change interest rates and, and change amounts and payoff dates. How long does it take to pay off? And if you pay off sooner, you know, you have all these kinds of calculators to keep an eye on your, your business finances. I mean, they have personal finances too, so you can use those for that. But it also helps you predict things that what you should do. Because like the thing with buying a car versus leasing a car, when you consider tax ramifications and depreciation And, you know, all these different factors. It helps you make the the better decisions. Put it that way. And in some cases, you might just decide, hey, it's really better for my business if I do it this way. But oh man, I really love to have that fancy new truck. So but at least you're making an informed decision rather than just guessing what it's going to mean to your business or your personal finances. So that's all I got to talk about here. It's like I said, go to that link and it's not the only place on line. If you find another place, it's got free calculators. Let it go, you know, try it out. Now I can't swear. Uh, now I didn't have to put my name or anything in there.
[00:08:10] So, the chances that that information is used against me somehow or violates my privacy seems pretty thin because I didn't have to log in to use these calculators. So. So they don't know who I am. They might see my IP address. But that doesn't, you know, and and plus I was just playing with stuff and I don't know how that could hurt you that bad. So but anyway, do check that out. If they make you log in and, and the terms of service say we're going to use this information and sell it and make a million pieces of spam showing up at your front door and your email and your texts. And that's different. All right. But anyway, calculators can really help you make good decisions and also evaluate where you are and what you need to do to get out of the position you're in. If you are in a bad position, say, all right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com, and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.