I was thinking about what I should do for my first python blog, and I thought of some of the basic but cool stuff that I have done using python. I arrived at the Loan Calculator that I made in python. If you are looking for how to set up python I have a blog on that which you could refer to. Anyways, thank you for joining me in this blog and without further ado, this is the first part of my script.
#Get details of loan
money_owed = float(input(‘How much money do you owe (in dollars)?\n’))
apr = float(input(‘What is the annual percentage rate of the loan?\n’))
payment = float(input(‘How much will you pay off each month (in dollars)?\n’))
months = int(input(‘How many months do you want to see the results for?\n’))
To start I created 4 variables. First, money_owed, I make it a float since there could be decimals involved in the loan amount. Then I created apr and made that a float as well since interest rates could be anywhere including but not limited to whole numbers. Next is payment, also a float. This is because you don’t always (if ever) have a payment that is exactly x amount of dollars and 0 cents. Lastly is months which I made an int since loans aren’t dealt in terms of half months or anything other than a whole month so there is no concern for decimals here. I also made sure that the variables required an input so you could designate the loan amount, apr, etc. yourself.
monthly_rate = apr/100/12
Moving on to where variables are starting to be used to create new variables, we have monthly_rate. Since I am using apr which is a float the monthly rate is automatically designated as a float data type. To get the monthly rate I did the standard calculation of the apr divided by 100 (percent) divided by 12 (months).
for i in range(months):
# Calculate interest to pay
interest_paid = money_owed * monthly_rate
# Add in interest
money_owed = money_owed + interest_paid
Now we get to the For i in range(months). This is what causes the result set to loop for each month allowing you to see the payments over time. For the next variable created we have interest_paid. This is mainly for use in the text that gets returned on each loop which I will get to later. Following up on that is the money_owed variable again. We re-evaluate the value of the money_owed variable each time the loop run based on the interest_paid and the money_owed.
if(money_owed – payment) < 0:
print(‘The last payment is’, money_owed)
print(‘You paid off the loan in’, i+1, ‘months’)
break
Wrapping it up, we get into the printing section. The first snippet is related to the money_owed saying that if money_owed minus the payment is less than zero,then it will print “The last payment is” and then however much was left on the money_owed value. Then on the next line it prints “You paid off the loan in”, whatever the value of the i is (how many months it looped) plus 1 since it starts from 0, “months”. Then we have a break to say that we are done with that specific string of input.
# Make payment
money_owed = money_owed – payment
print(‘Paid’, payment, ‘of which’, interest_paid, ‘was interest.’, end = ‘ ‘)
print(‘Now I owe’, money_owed)
Lastly is what we will see on each iteration of the loop. As you can see, it will return “Paid”, however much you entered for the payment variable, “of which”, the calculated interest_paid variable, “was interest.” Then we say that we want this string to end and to start another with a space at the end with the end = ‘ ‘. Then we print “Now I owe”, and then how much money is calculated to be owned in the money_owned variable that is getting looped.
This is the script as a whole as well as the results that return.
Thank you everyone for reading my blog today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and be on the lookout for any more python blogs that I might publish here. Thanks again!
Bailey McDonald
Data Engineer, Patriot Consulting
Email: bkmcdonald@patriotconsultingcorp.com | Blogs: Patriot Consulting Blogs
LinkedIn: Personal: BaileyMcDonald | Company: Patriot Consulting
