Excel Ideas

For those who just like to collect data, here are some ways to use Excel in your daily life. I personally like the idea of using Excel to track grocery costs. Maybe rather than tracking everything, it would be useful to track prices that fluctuate or that there are often specials on that mask the true “price” of a product. (Does anybody buy yogurt when it’s not on “sale”?) It would also be interesting to compare products head-to-head with so-called “wholesale” store prices.

Besides work, I use Excel for quick-and-dirty calculators. Right now, we’re researching our options for dropping our PMI insurance from our mortgage. So, I created a workbook that looks at two variables: appraised value of our home and amount of lump sum payment. I have also set up two targets of equity-to-value: 20% and 25%. I’ve also created a column that expresses the lump-sum in terms of how many months of PMI that equates to. I should add a column that expresses how many months each lump sum would knock off the re-payment of our mortgage.