Financial calculators exist

Saturday November 23, 2024

When you take the CFP exam, you are allowed to use a dedicated financial calculator like the Texas Instruments "Business Analyst" BA II Plus. How wild is that?

What does it do? You can start to guess from buttons like "IRR," but the manual explains much more about how the functionality is organized into "worksheets" and so on.

Do people use these for real, in their work? My guess is that they're sort of an archaic thing that persists only for the exam? Surely people use one of many online calculators, or Excel, or some other more user-friendly tool? (Although I don't really know what a great example is; most of the ones I see at a quick look seem pretty crummy...)