This is my first sincere attempt at blogging-:). I don't know, why I am in the mood to blog, but here we go. I was pretty frustrated at being unable to figure out the outstanding balance on my home loan, and not being in Inda (where the loan is) doesn't help much. It is, probably, unfair to brag on without giving a bit of history of the frustration-:).
I (with my wife) bought a house, some 5 years back. We had looked at a few apartments and finally liked one in Harrington Road, Chennai. We liked it and were hell-bent to buy it. Of course, being young, and egotistic, not to accept any help from our parents, we set about to get a home loan. The problem was that I was not working in a multi-national company, so, even though I was earning a good enough salary, none of the banks would give a loan (easily), and I was one, who could not be bothered to hang around these banks (after all, they were going to profit from all the interest that I was going to pay;)). Fortunately, the aprtment that we were buying belonged to a big-wig from Citibank, and voila! we got the loan within 24 hours, the catch was that Citibank charged atleast 1% more than the other banks. And our home loan started at 10.25%. I wasn't complaining, as I got everything done without moving my lazy arse too much (of course at a premium, but hey that was alright with me).
Even though, i didn't give too much about the higher ROI, but I always wanted to shift to other banks like ICICI or HDFC, etc but there were other problems in that (which I will grumble another day). Like most young, ambitious peopel, we led busy lives and even moved out of India. One day, I thought, I should pre-close my loan, and sent an email to Citibank from the "secure" emailing facility present in their internet banking; but, Citibank' s customer service pointed me to call their customer service. I wondered the loss of the "secure" emailing facilty if only I had to be pointed to their phonebanking service (inspite of indicating that I was an NRI). However, I called up their phonebanking and unlike other banks, was quickly directed to the correct officer, who gave me the outstanding balance (again, not without educating the non-benefits of fore-closing my loan). But, the outstanding balance was based on the initial ROI of 10.25%, and since the inception of the loan, Citibank had changed their ROI 8 times. Of course, I did not realise that she had just given me the wrong amount. Generally, I like to check out numbers(guess that is a bad habit of being an engineer:),one needs to see it to believe it). Being the lazy arse, that I was, I started to search for an EMI calculator that would give me the break-ups of interest and principal components (for the entire tenure) as well as allow me to input the different ROIs. Well, it was difficult to find on, but I bumped into Ranjits blog on Calculating EMIs and was inspired to make a customised calculator. I would be more than happy to put up the calculator, which is basically a spread-sheet.
