Texas Instruments BA-II Plus Financial Calculator

Those Little Extras

When you’re planning for college expenses you usually think of things like tuition, room & board and books. At least those were the kind of things I thought about when I started back to school in the fall of 2006. Well, I didn’t worry so much about room & board, since I am doing my entire studies online via Eastern Oregon University’s Division of Distance Education.

When I signed up for a math class called ‘Loans & Lotteries’ my professor recommended (VERY strongly) that we purchase the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator. There are many other financial calculators on the market, but this is what my professor liked best and also what is used in the course’s text.

I was worried that a calculator like this would be spendy. Usually specialty calculators are pricey, but I was pleasantly surprised that the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator was readily available and most places charged about $30 for it. I was pleased with this, as $30 was just about all I had left over after my tuition and books were paid for out of my financial aid award.

Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator

Features
The Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator is a financial calculator, so it has some features that a regular, and even a scientific, calculator lacks:

*Time-Value-of-Money and Amortization Worksheet
*Cash Flow Worksheet
*Bond Worksheet
*Depreciation Worksheet
*Statistics Worksheet
*Percent Change/Compound Interest Worksheet
*Interest Conversion Worksheet
*Date Worksheet
*Profit Margin Worksheet
*Breakeven Worksheet
*Memory Worksheet

Two other handy features of the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator are the hard plastic snap-on case that it comes in and the instruction manual. This manual is the key to unlocking the potential of your new purchase! Do not toss your instruction booklet out, it will explain to you all the amazing things this baby can do.

Using It
I am NOT going to turn this review into a ‘how to perform specific calculations’ type of thing. For one thing, it would take forever to accomplish because the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator does so many different things. What I am going to do is give you some general information about its use. After all, the chances are that if you are looking at a review of a financial calculator you are likely either a student whose instructor will teaching you about the functions it performs or a professional who has already learned these formulas and wants a calculator that can do them.

The first half of the class I used the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator dealt with interest. The formulas that the text was showing me for doing these problems ‘longhand’ were enough to drive a person to drink. Then I just read the steps for using the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator to compute them and it was simple. It took just a few pushes of the button and I could tell how much interest I will have paid on a $300,000 home loan after the 75th payment, the 175th payment or any other! And this is just one small piece of what the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator does.

Conclusion

If you are a financial student or a financial professional, I cannot imagine a better calculator than the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator. It does just about anything you could want a financial calculator to do, with minimal effort needed on the user’s part, and it comes with Texas Instruments quality.

I would pay more for the Texas Instruments name (their products are worth it), but thankfully I didn’t have to and neither will you. I highly recommend the Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator.