Customer Reviews

Texas Instruments BA35 Solar Calculator

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Anyone who purchases a BA-35, uses it and then tries out the TI BA II Plus for about 12 bucks more is going to suffer a bad case of buyer's remorse. The 35 is woefully underpowered in financial calculation capability compared to the next higher level of financial calculators. The reason I have one is that is is one of the required calculators for the actuarial exams (for reasons I have yet to figure out).

My overall recommendation is -- if you want a financial calculator that has actual capability, spring for either the HP12c or the TI BA II Plus.

Everyone who borrows money to finance a car or a house should own a business calculator. It can quickly compute in advance how much your monthly payments will be once you insert the amount borrowed, the yearly interest rate, and the number of payments. Or,if you prefer, you can insert the amount of the monthly payment you can afford and calculate the amount you can afford to borrow or the number of payments over which you will need to spread out the loan. You will also be able to protect yourself against accidental or deliberate errors made by the lender. For the purposes outlined above, the Texas Instruments BA35 is a very good buy at a bargain price. If you need a more sophisticated business calculator I recommend the Texas Instruments BA II Plus.

I have a TI BA-35 that I purchased about 15 years ago and it still works. It has just the basic statistics functions (found on almost all scientific calculators) and compund interest/ time-of-money calculations, but that's all a small business generally needs.

It came with a great book, teaching elementary foundations of statistics and finance. I do not know if the present version comes with this book, but I would hope so. I never had a statisitics course in college, but with this aid can do some meaningful analysis.

The Texas Instraments BA-35 is a calculator who's time has passed. It does allow the practiced user to ammoritize loans or value annuities with amazing speed, but today there are better options out there.

Deficiencies: 1. Lack of algebraic logic, it just does the calculations in the order you enter them. 2. inconvenient memory- it takes several keystrokes to store or retreive from the memory (but you can use the 5 financial registers as memories). 3. wears out too easily- I have had the displays on 3-4 of these calculators go whacky on me. This is not a problem I have had with other TI models.

There are lots of cool tricks you can do with this calculator, but even the Society of Actuaries has moved on to allow more capable models.

I bought this calculator for my first finance class 12 years ago. While it does have some limitations such as not being able to work with uneven cash flows, it is still the finance calculator I grab when I want to figure something out in a hurry (I also own an HP 19BII and TI BAII Plus). The BAII Plus does do much more for only a few more dollars, but it is not as quick for simple finance calculations. Further, the BA 35 is still in perfect shape after much use, while the BAII Plus' display has begun malfunctioning and some of the digits do not show up at all now. The BA 35 is a great calculator, but ultimately, I would suggest the HP 17BII (which I have also used extensively, but do not own) if money is not a consideration.

I was an instructor for 37 years at Milwaukee Area Technical College. I purchased several hundreds of the TI - BA35 for my students in Business Math and Statistics. This was by far the easiest Business Calculator to compute financial functions. The BA II was too complicated to compute the exact same financial functions. I retired 2 1/2 years ago. At that time the TI - BA35 was no longer available in the stores. I purchased the TI - BA35 from Amazon to replace the one that I had loaned to a person that lost mine.