loan-information

Attention librarians and library lovers: Benita Epstein's cartoons exhibit true wit with a whimsical, good-natured tone. If you are turned off by the many cartoonists who are preoccupied with trite or gross subjects, check out this book!

There are many fine cartoons in this collection, but one sticks in my mind like an arrow in a bull's eye. It shows a librarian at an information counter, with two patrons waiting for service -- a chicken and an egg. The librarian asks, "Who's first?" A second later, the subtle, implied punchline strikes; a wonderful, somehow profound cartoon.

That same style of riddle might apply to the rest of the book -- which came first, the humor or the library themes? -- but the riddle is a simple one. I know the answer. With everything Epstein draws, the wit always comes first.

This is how good the book is: when I read my copy, I did so by flashlight, shivering in a house without heat (thanks to the ice storm that snapped New England into powerless pieces), and I laughed.

Along with the rest of your emergency provisions, that's a book to keep at hand.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I mean, who doesn't like to look at mortgage amortization tables? Me and my family like to sit around and quiz each other by saying stuff like "What is the monthly payment on a 30 year fixed interest mortgage of $135,000 at 8.25%?" We've even set it up in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" format with lifelines and what have you and we have a real blast!

When we want to take a break, we just pull out the book on the calculation of Pi to 150,000 places and see who can recite the farthest. Then we have a group hug!

You may not use it often, but this book will come in very handy when planning to borrow money. I've been an investment professional since 1988, and this is the most borrowed book on my shelf. I also owned the previous edition, and this version has been improved with the inclusion of rates down to 2% and the expansion of loan amounts to $300,000 in the primary table.

The book is conveniently organized in four tables, ordered from most-commonly to least-commonly used (as it happens, largest to smallest). Table 1 (monthly amortization) is where everyone spends the most time. Just turn to the interest rate page, then read across for "loan amount" and down for "years in term," and you've got your monthly payment to the penny. For non-round numbered loan amounts, you can avoid having to interpolate by grabbing a calculator and turning to Table 2 (required payments for monthly, quarterly, etc.), where you can look up the multiplier (per $1000) corresponding to the rate and term of a given loan (yep, that's how your mortgage lender does the math). Less frequently used are loan progress charts and proration data, Tables 3 and 4, respectively.

This book is straightforward, convenient, and travels well. My favorite of its kind.

The gossip is mine, not in the book. Most librarians won't know this, but Virginia Boucher, aside from being emeritus professor of libraries for the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the mother of Eric Boucher, better known as punk rock legend Jello Biafra. It's only logical that one of the most erudite voices to emerge in the modern musical counterculture should have its roots in the scholarship of such a remarkable family. Virginia's daughter, by the way, was also a scholar at the U. of C. Boulder, where an annual award for free speech has been named in her honor.

The CDROM is essentially a dump of the information found on government websites such as SBA, SEC, etc.

The information is voluminous so if you have a slow modem, there may be some value in purchasing the info on the CDROM for the sake of having it consolidated in one place. You will learn little new if you have already been to the websites.

Also, some of the links on the CDROM do not work properly. You open the page in Adobe Acrobat and receive and error message saying the page has to be opened in a browser. You open the page in a browser and you get a message saying the page has to be opened in Adobe Acrobat.

That kind of foolishness more or less sums up the value of the CDROM from my perspective.

Not only is all of this info available online, but the CD gives you a collection of non-indexed, gigantically HUGE Acrobat PDF files, some about 100MB in size. Navigating a 5MB text PDF is painfully slow - try 100 MB. Finding what you're seeking is practically impossible, and navigating PDFs of that size takes an eternity. Even a fast machine takes a couple minutes just to load the files into Acrobat, never mind doing searches, etc.

If they had broken up the files and named them logically (instead of titles like A1, B1, etc.), and provided some kind of indexing application or document that would point you to specifically what you wanted, then, yes, it might be handy to have. Otherwise, go online, and find answers 100 times more quickly. This is a ridiculously poorly done CD-ROM in this day and age. Big waste of $, in my opinion. If you have a slower/older computer without much memory, you'd REALLY want to avoid this thing like the plague.

This disc contains pdf files downloaded from government web pages. Save yourself the money and go to the SBA, GSA, SEC web pages yourself and look up the information that is relevant to you.