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(C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises M O R T G A G E D E S I G N E R Version 1.x Reference Manual Mortgage calculations complete with amortization schedules! Supports easy to use "What if?" calculations. Context sensitive help and on-line manual make it easy! Mortgage Designer for Windows is user supported software (Shareware). If you use it past the initial 15 day evaluation period, you are required to register it. No exceptions! Registered Users: Your serial number can be found on the back of your manual, the distribution disk, or on the registration card. Mortgage Designer for Windows "Mortgage Calculations -- Fast, Accurate, and Easy" is published by MaeDae Enterprises 5430 Murr Road Peyton, CO 80831 U.S.A. (719) 683-3860 Published and printed in the United States of America. Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises as a licensed, unpublished, proprietary work. All international rights reserved. Page 1 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises The printed Reference Manual and associated registered software may not be copied, resold, reproduced, disclosed, archived, transmitted, or transferred in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of MaeDae Enterprises. You may freely distribute the Shareware version. REGISTERED USERS: (those who paid and received a serial number) MaeDae Enterprises hereby grants a "book" license to the original individual (even if purchased by a company) user of this copy of Mortgage Designer. You may use the program on your computer and make one backup for storage as long as there is no possibility of use or residence on more than one machine at any time. Every registered copy of Mortgage Designer has a unique, embedded serial number for traceabililty. You may not sell or give copies of the registered program or printed documentation to anyone. No exceptions. Pricing, specifications, and conditions are subject to change without notice. Send all registrations and inquiries for site (multiple CPU or network) licensing to MaeDae Enterprises at the address on the previous page. DISCLAIMER: MaeDae Enterprises makes NO claims AND offers NO warranties of any sort with Mortgage Designer. MaeDae Enterprises assumes NO responsibility for any damage resulting from the apparent or actual use of Mortgage Designer (mental or physical). The program provided is not guaranteed as to merchantability or fitness for its ultimate use. The user accepts all responsibility for use and may not resell the program. IBM PC/AT is a registered trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation. Mortgage Designer is a trademark of MaeDae Enterprises. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners. Page 2 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises PREFACE ABOUT THIS MANUAL You will notice that this manual is concise. This is intentional as we strived to make Mortgage Designer the easiest program of its type to use. We opted to provide an extensive built-in user help system. Feel free to use this reference manual to install and get acquainted with the program. For many of you, this may be your first exposure to Shareware. To help eliminate possible confusion, we included a short description of the Shareware marketing concept, explaining what it is and why it relies on YOU for its survival. WHAT IS SHAREWARE? Shareware is not a kind of software. It is a revolutionary method of marketing Commercial software. Our software is Commercial software that we are allowing you to examine for 15 days before you make the purchase decision. With traditional marketing methods, you have to purchase Commercial software from a computer store or through mail order businesses, then try it out, and hope it does what you want. Shareware allows you to "try before you buy!" We rely upon you, the customer, to examine our software. If you find it useful, please register. Your support is needed for us to continue to improve our products. With warmest regards, David Black President, MaeDae Enterprises Page 3 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises Table of Contents ================= Page Description ==== =========== 5. What is Mortgage Designer? An overview of its features. 6. Hardware Requirements 7. Installation - the "README.DOC" file. 7. Installation Notes 8. Getting Started 9. Tutorial 10. Using "What If?" Calculations 11. Troubleshooting 12. Basic Definitions 13. Mortgage Designer Limits 14. Additional Information Page 4 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises WHAT IS MORTGAGE DESIGNER? ========================== Mortgage Designer is a powerful and easy to use mortgage package for Windows 3.x that allows you to: 1. Quickly calculate mortgage repayment information, 2. Generate amortization schedules for output to the screen, printer, or file, with the flexibility of choosing which payments are shown, 3. Perform complex "What if?" calculations where the principal, interest rate, term, or payment can be adjusted, 4. And do it all without cryptic commands! Windows even makes it fun! Page 5 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS ===================== 1. IBM PC/AT, IBM PS/2, or fully compatible computer capable of running Windows 3.0 or later. 2. At least one 5.25" or 3.5" floppy disk drive. Two floppy disk drives or one floppy and a hard disk (200K free space minimum for the full system) are strongly recommended. INSTALLATION - README.DOC ========================= For all installation information see the README.DOC on the main distribution diskette. You can view the information on-line or print it out on your printer. README.DOC is constantly updated to contain the latest information. P.S. The Shareware version of Mortgage Designer is complete. However, it is a 15 day trial version. Also, additional product information screens have been added. Feel free to share ONLY the Shareware version with friends and potential users of Mortgage Designer for 15 day trial/evaluation purposes only. You may not use the Shareware version on other machines in order to avoid purchasing additional copies of the full program. You may not give away any copies or make more than one copy of the fully operational program for other than archival purposes. The full version of Mortgage Designer has a unique serial number embedded in each copy for traceability. Page 6 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises IMPORTANT INSTALLATION NOTES: 1. Diskette #1 contains many files in addition to MD.EXE. Please make sure these files are all installed in the same directory when running the program. 2. If Mortgage Designer does not run properly: A. Your machine may not be 100% IBM PC operating system compatible or Windows may be installed incorrectly. This is not always disastrous and a quick call to our phone support staff may solve your problem. B. You may have a slightly incompatible Windows video driver. Usually, updating your driver or re-installing Windows solves the problem. C. If you have any memory resident programs or system drivers, try running without them loaded on your computer. 3. This manual is designed to give you a general overview and familiarity with the program. More complete, up-to-date information is available to you through the extensive built-in user help (F1) system or the help button when available on dialog boxes. When using the more advanced features of the program, the help screens will guide you through the toughest questions with ease. As Mortgage Designer continues to add more features, you can be sure that the built in help will give you the guidance needed. This way everybody wins. We don't spend money continually revising manuals and charging you higher prices. You get what you want and deserve: accurate, up-to-date information. So fire up the computer, dig in, and welcome to Mortgage Designer! Page 7 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises GETTING STARTED =============== After you run MD.EXE using the file manager, the MAIN MENU will appear on your screen. The Main Menu options with descriptions are below. *File: This menu option provides the basic data editing option which allows you to select the mortgage info you want to work with. It also provides a menu option to save the mortgage information as the default which is to be used each time you run Mortgage Designer. Note: You must first tell Mortgage Designer the specifics of the loan before you can use the other sections of Mortgage Designer. *Calculate: Allows you to calculate the remaining balance, cost of loan, and pay "What If?" to solve for missing information. *Reports: Generate amortization schedules and compare mortgage options. *Tax Time: Calculates the distribution of your payments divided into yearly principal and interest totals. This should be very useful at tax time. It will also estimate your yearly tax savings due to interest paid on the mortgage. Use these figures as rough estimates only since each person's tax situation is normally very different. *Help: Provides the help index/commands, invoice printing, and information about the version of Mortgage Designer. Page 8 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises TUTORIAL (CALCULATING A MORTGAGE) ================================= Now let's do something simple to demonstrate how Mortgage Designer works. Choose the File menu option. Then pick the Edit option from the menu. A dialog box will appear allowing you to edit the information concerning the mortgage. Use your mouse and click on the edit field containing the principal amount. You may also select the principal edit field by pressing Alt+P (the P is underlined, so Alt plus the underlined key will select it). For our sample loan edit each field to contain the following: Principal: 100000.00 Interest rate: 10.00 Term: 30 years After you alter the edit fields to contain the above information, select the payment button. A dialog box will pop up showing that the payment is $877.57 per month. Thats all there is to it. Select OK then select the done button and we're finished. Note: If you normally work with a certain principal, interest rate, or term, use the database option to save the information as defaults for Mortgage Designer. They will be added to LoanData.INI and automatically loaded each time you run Mortgage Designer (if specified as the default). Page 9 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises USING "WHAT IF?" CALCULATIONS ============================= Mortgage Designer supports calculating the missing item from principal, interest rate, term, and payment. Any missing item can be calculated given the other three. When using the missing variable area under the calculate pulldown, you enter the information you know. Mortgage Designer will calculate the missing item. Tell Mortgage Designer which item is missing by checking the radio button for the missing data item. Then select the calculate button to calculate the missing item. You will notice that as you solve for different items, the basic mortgage information will change slightly. Example: Use the data from our tutorial on the previous page and solve for the principal. The principal will be changed from 100000.00 to 99999.82. The difference of 18 cents is caused by the rounding of the math. The term in years has the most granularity. Since we can only have whole years, it is extremely hard to accurately handle this area. Mortgage Designer rounds to the nearest whole year. After you solve for year, we recommend you perform a second calculation solving for a second area. We might first solve for the term, then solve for the payment to allow Mortgage Designer to compensate for the granularity of the years. As you run through the mortgage what if calculations, consider a 15 year loan verses a 30 year loan. The payments are not twice as high! They are only a little higher and you reap huge savings over the life of a mortgage. (You can use the calculate cost of loan section of Mortgage Designer to obtain the total cost of a mortgage over its lifetime.) Page 10 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises TROUBLESHOOTING =============== If Mortgage Designer will not run, you may have insufficient memory or too many memory resident programs. Try running Mortgage Designer with no memory resident programs or allocate a larger swapfile under Windows. See your Windows User's Guide for help with the Swapfile program. If Mortgage Designer just stops running and you get an "Unrecoverable Application Error," you may have incompatible hardware/software. Try running Mortgage Designer in the 386 Enhanced mode (if you have a 386 computer) to see if that corrects the problem. Occasionally, certain memory resident TSR or "pop-up" programs conflict with Mortgage Designer. In general, there is no problem, but there are many new programs being written without regard to the system requirements of other programs that may be running at the same time. Remove them from memory, and try again. If that fails, try getting rid of device drivers in your CONFIG.SYS file. Invalid values for the principal, interest rate, or term can create math problems. Invalid values used in the math calculations can result in Mortgage Designer failing to run correctly. If this occurs AND you have saved the values as the default, delete LoanData.INI and then rerun Mortgage Designer. Page 11 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises BASIC DEFINITIONS: ================== The terms used in Mortgage Designer may be a little confusing. They are terms frequently used when discussing loans. We have defined the most important ones for you in the definitions listed below. They are: Amortization schedule - A report showing each period during a loan with information on how much went to principal/interest and the loan balance. Interest Rate - The cost of the loan expressed as the percent per year. The rate of repayment for money being borrowed. Payment - The amount of money to be repaid per repayment period. Principal - The amount of money being borrowed or loaned out. Term - How long is the money being borrowed or loaned out. Page 12 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises MORTGAGE DESIGNER LIMITS ======================== The limitations on accuracy for built-in math causes Mortgage Designer to place limits on the range of data you can enter. Listed below are the most important areas: Principal - $100 to $500,000,000.00 Interest rate - 0.1% to 25.0% Term - 1 to 30 years Payments - $1.00 to $500,000,000.00 per period Mortgage start date - MM/DD/YYYY where month is 1-12, day is normal day of month, and year ranges from 1900 to 2100 Notes: 1. Mortgage Designer uses double length floating point numbers for its calculations. This means Mortgage Designer will be more accurate than many of the figures from banks and financial institutions. However, even double length floating point numbers have a limit on their accuracy. Because of these limits, the values for principal, interest, term, and payment used by Mortgage Designer have built-in checks to ensure they are limited so the calculations are always accurate. 2. The above limits are imposed to ensure the accuracy of answers and should not limit users in solving mortgage calculations. However, we do want to be receptive to your needs. If any of the limits need to be adjusted, please let us know. 3. Database - No limits except for minor performance slowdown with exceptionally large databases. Page 13 (C) Copyright 1991,1992 MaeDae Enterprises ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ====================== The information listed below is provided in an effort to aid you in working with Mortgage Designer and understanding the mortgage calculation process. Before you can use Mortgage Designer you have to define the problem to be solved. Get all the facts you need to solve the problem. If you do not have the principal, interest rate, or term then use the calculate missing variable area of Mortgage Designer to obtain this information. After you have defined the problem and start using Mortgage Designer you may notice that numbers you enter are changed slightly. This is because pure numbers used by computers do not contain commas, dollar signs, etc. Because of the limitations of number conversions, Mortgage Designer works in the background to constantly strip out invalid characters. This is transparent to you unless the "cleaned up" number is invalid. Then you will be notified of the problem. Page 14