Addicted to Dinkytown

I'm getting addicted to www.dinkytown.net. Granted, there are a great many things to distract us (and addict us) on the internet, but who could have guessed mine would be financial calculators? I find them endlessly fascinating.

I haven't a clue where they got the name, but it is easy to remember.

Dinkytown is to online calculators what the Mall of America is to shopping malls, bigger, better more comprehensive. In terms of figuring out all aspects of money, it's a you-name-it-they-have it kind of place.

My first introduction to similar calculators was on the website of my local credit union. I had never tried one before. For hours I plugged in various numbers and studied the results, in the category titled "how much could I save?" This experiment was something of a revelation for me.

I also wanted to look ahead and get a ballpark figure of how our IRA would grow over 10 years time. When might we be able to retire-early, late, never? What if we increased our monthly amount by $300, for example? I knew our current IRA balance of course and I knew the lifetime return of the mutual fund where the IRA is lodged. I could estimate our monthly contribution. It worked like a charm! The final results were larger than I expected and that made me feel more secure.

Debt pay-off was another issue for us. We're in the midst of getting rid of years of credit card debt. It's been weighing us down and holding us back far too long. Financial calculators let you tinker with different amounts (as long as you know your interest rate) and bingo, the pay-off date is produced. Why deal in vague, guess-work, when exact dates can be found?

Next, I found another batch of calculations online at www.bankrate.com. They were good, but I wasn't thrilled with their format. Then, further searching took me to Dinkytown. Although I haven't seen them all, the site claims to have 300 different calculators.