Financial Cookbook

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On: 2020-09-14 16:51:10
Updated by: InkBlot
On: 2023-08-05 20:50:53
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What is Financial Cookbook?

Once upon a time, personal finance was straightforward. A savings account paid 5 1/4 percent. Monthly home loan payments were roughly 1 percent of the mortgage amount. You didn’t worry about what to put in your IRA because you didn’t know what an IRA was. You were happy then.

But times have changed. Home buying is complex enough to make you want to live in a tent, and a “creative” car loan is as easy to decipher as a Jackson Pollack canvas. How do you make sense of this financial stew? One way to try is with Electronic Arts’ Financial Cookbook .

Financial Cookbook contains 32 financial planning “recipes" that calculate the potential returns from savings deposits, treasury bills, IRAs, and life insurance, as well as the costs of home or car buying and renting. You simply select a recipe from the program’s index file, plug in values where requested, and click on Compute. Financial Cookbook’s calculations take into account inflation, interest, tax rates, and other particulars. Tables of supporting data accompany the results.

To calculate monthly home mortgage payments, for example, you select Mortgage Schedule, Yearly. Financial Cookbook requests figures for the mortgage amount, interest rate, and term. It calculates your monthly payment and displays an amortization table showing the interest and principal paid each year. Change the input variables, and you can generate stacks of “what-if” comparisons...

Financial Cookbook's simplicity has its cost. Because it relies on tax information from past 1040 forms and on your estimates of key figures, you can’t expect its results to be 100 percent accurate. The program is designed for armchair financial planning, not for accounting. For reliable calculations, you must turn to a financial professional or a more sophisticated personal accounting program.

Manual Labor

Although Financial Cookbook bills itself as “the calculator that does all the work,” there are times when you must do some legwork. A key factor in many calculations is your marginal tax rate. You must manually extract data from old tax forms and plug it into Financial Cookbook. Once the rate has been calculated, however, it can be saved and automatically called up by the program as needed.

Marginal tax rates must be manually calculated in a number of hypothetical situations. For example, to see how long your IRA will sustain you after retirement, you must estimate your postretirement income and find its corresponding tax rate in government tax tables. To compute the taxes you will save by purchasing a house, you must manually research your potential marginal tax rate by adding up estimated homeowner deductions and looking up rates in IRS tax tables. There is no provision for sharing spreadsheet data with the program.

Recipe 33: Cutting Production Costs

Financial Cookbook appears to have been hastily adapted for the Macintosh. While the outside of its package shows Mac screens, the inside is all Apple II. Users are instructed to ignore the first three pages of the manual and are directed instead to a small brochure describing Mac-specific commands. Fortunately, the bulk of the manual refers to generic program functions. The program fails to take advantage of the Mac’s display capabilities, instead presenting all text in a plain 12-point Monaco font. Simple boldface headings would have made data entry and output windows more readable. To dress up the program s solutions, you must copy them through the Clipboard to MacWrite or Microsoft Word.

Financial novices can delve into complicated financial situations and whip up limitless numbers of “what-if” comparisons with Financial Cookbook. “What ifs” provide a good introduction to the effects of present value, marginal tax rates, interest, and inflation on common financial transactions. Financial Cookbook is not for financial professionals, but it gives beginners some insight into their financial destinies.

Burns, Walter C. (April 1984). Financial Cookbook. Macworld. (pgs. 132, 134, 138).


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Architecture


Motorola 68K



Compatibility notes


Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac





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