financial functions / formulas to reduce costs on financial credit instruments

OK, Adam - what you need to do is tell us the computations that YOU would make (manually) to produce the answers, and then we can help you with converting the maths to Excel functions.

If you are wanting someone else to do the maths for you, then that's a big ask, especially as you would then be using their expertise to 'sell' yours, if you see what I mean, so it might be more appropriate to post this in Commercial Services and offer your 'developer' some recompense.

Originally Posted by AliGW

OK, Adam - what you need to do is tell us the computations that YOU would make (manually) to produce the answers, and then we can help you with converting the maths to Excel functions.

here is what I would do manually Ali, if I were to throw money around specifically for the purpose of getting the most out of big banks, using them to get what I want, or to get the to do what I want by giving them a PORTION of what they always want and what their motivations always are:

here is a table of data that I would work with and manipulate, which is the same layout as in the book I attached:

CURRENT BALANCE	CREDIT LINE	AVAILABLE CREDIT	AMOUNT DUE	APR
$1,616	$2,100	$484	$45	22.99%

so, in order to get the best chance of having a credit line increase of $2,000 granted, per my request to the company I am using in this example, 1 year from the data of the data specs in the table above, I would perform the following actions (while only spending a very minimal additional amount, if any at all, on the card over this 1 year timeframe):

AMOUNT PAID	RESULTING BALANCE AFTER PAYMENT	PAYMENT DATE	PURPOSE
$100	$1,525	1st day of Month 1	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$212	$1,320	1st day of Month 2	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$60	$1,275	1st day of Month 3	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$300	$985	1st day of Month 4	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$100	$895	1st day of Month 5	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$200	$710	1st day of Month 6	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$250	$470	1st day of Month 7	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$200	$278	1st day of Month 8	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$150	$135	1st day of Month 9	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$135	PENNIES	1st day of Month 10	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$100 (after charging $100 on card this same month)	$0	1st day of Month 11	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts
$200 (after charging $100 on card this same month)	$0	1st day of Month 12	show behavioral pattern to software + human analysts

obviously this is not perfect, but what I've given above, based on everything I know about corporate algorithmic nonsense, constant consumer-based behavior analysis by them, what they're scared of, what they want from the general public, how they act, how powerful they are, and how much the software does the work, gives the best chance of what I, as a user of their credit card, personally want from them. Does that help? If I can get some mathematical help in terms of built-in resources, I can take it from there. I've talked to all of the financial vendors, and each one of them act in different ways based on how smart they are, how much risk they take, and many other things. thanks.

Just look up Financial functions in Excel help.

I'll be intrigued to see if anyone at that other forum responds to you.

Can you provide a link to the thread you've started on the other forum, please - the URL of the actual thread, not the forum front end.

I am assuming that the other party in the recorded conversation has given his express permission for you to share the recording?

Three main reasons, in no particular order:
1. It's primarily an Access forum.
2. Your question is vague at best.
3. I've read quite a few of the discussions over there in which you have been involved, both before and after your ban. (Are you still titled 'Forum Troll'?)

Originally Posted by AliGW

I am assuming that the other party in the recorded conversation has given his express permission for you to share the recording?

I'm not sure you want to get into that discussion: https://www.access-programmers.co.uk...oyalty.314466/

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear - it reads like a bad dream that makes no sense after you wake up. It's got everything: a hacking vigilante, conspiracy theories, Adam telling us how amazing he is at everything ...

How to make friends and influence people (Part 2)!

Well, Adam - you mentioned here once that some people see you as a 'jerk' (your word, not mine), and there's very little in that Access forum thread that would dispel that myth for me.

It's time I stepped away from this thread.

PS You should NOT be sharing that telephone recording here or on any other public forum - the woman clearly did not give her consent.

No, I didn't listen to it, obviously!

As the person was referred to as 'she' on the other forum, I made an assumption. Either way, that person has not given their permission, so thank you for removing the conversation.

Originally Posted by vba_php

that's irrelevant. they have an excel forum, and many people answer many questions there. but it's not as heavy as this one.

Understatement of the week. Looks like they get about a post a week, which seems quite relevant to me in terms of your likelihood of getting a response.

it's supposed to be vague.

then the answers you get will be vague too, like mine earlier. What else could they be?

why would I give away what I know about the corporate world? for one thing,
if they're running software to scan anything and everything on the internet, which obviously everyone in the world is doing now anyway,
they wouldn't be too happy! see the image below for proof of bots running rampant everywhere (that is an image of a traffic log from one of my sites).
my favorite hit is the one called crawler.pagething.

Now that is irrelevant

Originally Posted by vba_php

I'm not amazing. I never have been. I just know the human race well. they are as predictable as the sun is sure to come up in the morning.

Really?

im the best person in the world at hiding money that can never be found.

Bold statement, then.

I don't know if this helps at all, because my knowledge of business/finance math is weak. What I see in your example is to pay down the credit card over ~10 months to near 0, then keep it there over the rest of the year. I don't see any pattern in the amounts paid per month towards the goal of paying the card off.

I assume you already know this, and probably know more than I do, but I will note these anyway.

You could use the PMT() function to get an "average" payment per month that pays the balance down to 0 at the end of 10 months. Of course, this really only works well if you intend to pay a constant amount per month, which doesn't seem to be the case.
You could use the NPV() function (plus some algebra, if memory serves) to compute the future value of a series of cash flows. This could be useful for determining if a proposed sequence of cash flows reduces the balance to 0, but is probably not useful for calculating the individual cash flows in the sequence.

As Rorya said, these (and many other functions) are listed in the help files under financial functions. If you are not willing to share your trade secrets, I don't see any way for us to help you program those trade secrets into a spreadsheet.

Originally Posted by vba_php

Rorya you said something, but it wasn't much in terms of value I can get use out of.

Now you know how I feel...

What sort of 'pattern'? You have given two concepts, and no more. The 'brief' is, at very best, vague.

Please be very clear, Adam, because you are beginning to get a little bit bit snarky now: nobody is trying to be unhelpful, however we cannot magic up some sort of formula out of cotton wool ideas with no substance.

Honestly, I think you are on to a hiding to nothing with your request as it stands in this thread - sorry. The fault lies with a lack of specifics: one common denominator is not enough for anyone to be able to help you.

but you guys might not like the answers, because:
1) you probably won't believe what I have to tell you anyway.
2) you probably don't understand what corporations always want from the general public, and what they secretly do to always get what they want.
3) the secrets are religious in nature, because the desire for capitalism and prosperity by the human race is driven by a thousands-of-years-old flaw in human beings.

That all may be true, but we have helped people with "foolproof" gambling strategies or stock market strategies. We have helped with numerology and astrology problems. The forum rules forbid helping with password cracking problems (which sometimes bumps up against some interesting cryptography questions), but, outside of that, we are willing to help with a variety of problems (even if we may have doubts about the philosophy/superstitions behind the problem). Speaking for myself, I'm interested in interesting programming problems and am usually not too worried about what the OP's philosophy or superstition. I think you will find that, if you present a problem as a programming problem (and leave the philosophy out of it) and then work with us to put the program together, we will help with a variety of problems.

I told you that there are NO specifics in terms of coding and patterns because every card company uses a mix of software and humans to analyze behavior. but there IS one common denominator.....they want money and they want consumers to spend money. so, can we turn those 2 concepts into any sort of pattern that you can use to help me out here?

Unfortunately, I don't know how to get in touch with arguably the penultimate expert on something like this -- Hari Seldon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon ). With Asimov's passing almost 2 decades ago, I am guessing that Seldon's contact information is long lost to Earth-bound humans .

It sounds like the goal of this project is to try to guess at the algorithms and patterns that corporations use. I expect that such a question is better suited to forums for psychology, economics, sociology, and/or statistics. I would expect that someone wanting to work on this would gather a lot of data, spend a lot of time computing correlations between different variables in the data and making guesses at what variables are pertinent (and probably guessing wrong more often than guessing right). I expect it is a vastly larger project than any of us wants to tackle for you (though I expect we would be happy to help with small, specific questions along the way, like "how to calculate the present value or future value of a series of cash flows").

It looks like it is merely a "balance sheet" with a list of cards and current balances. I don't see much here that would help us divine a complex strategy -- especially speaking as one who understands little of the kind of business finance math that I expect you are looking for.

I'm looking for functions that can help me discern how to give banks the least amount of money in interest

Simple -- almost trivial -- analysis. The amount of interest you pay to the each bank/card is (simplified) interest=rate*balance. Assuming non-negative values, the minimum of this function is 0 when balance is 0 (I'm obviously assuming there is no way to get rate to be 0). Pulling out the one part of your question that makes sense to me, and my simple analysis says that you want to pay off all the balances in order to minimize the interest paid.

I expect that that analysis is too simple/trivial, and that there are other constraints and conditions that you are wanting to consider.

You are asking for functions to do this, but are you interested in using Solver at all? If you can calculate interest paid and other constraints and considerations, Solver may be able to find a solution to the problem that minimizes interest paid while respecting other constraints.

That's correct.