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15.0: Introduction

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    You must make financial decisions throughout your professional career and everyday personal life. Some of these decisions are easy. To make the best choice you need a little intuition and simple calculation. Other decisions are very challenging, confronting you with a great array of competing options, each of which is bundled with numbers projected from now until ... whenever. If you tried just to wing it in these latter scenarios, you could make a catastrophic mistake.

    For example, let’s say you are the production manager for a company that soon needs to replace a critical machine that is nearing the end of its useful life. At your invitation, salespeople from three competing companies have paid you a visit this week. Each of them showed you an impressive replacement machine. The three machines appear to be equal in design and performance, but each carries a different price tag. Each also differs widely in operating costs such as power consumption, consumables, and labour costs. Maintenance costs follow different timetables. In all cases, you can either purchase the machines or lease them through the supplier’s leasing plan.

    These machines are not cheap. Because the one you select represents such a significant investment on your company’s part, good financing for it is an integral part of the decision. Will the money to pay for it come from a bank loan, a bond issuance, or by issuing some common shares? Perhaps the finance department can withdraw some money from your organization’s current investments. Each of these funding sources is associated with a different interest rate.

    Your company relies on you to choose the best machine at the lowest possible cost. From a strictly financial perspective, and assuming that all machines are equally productive, which of the three machines is your best choice?

    This investment decision should not be guesswork. In previous chapters you have already learned many of the fundamental financial skills required to make effective monetary decisions. In this chapter you will amalgamate and apply your existing skills in dealing with compound interest, ordinary annuities, annuities due, leases, loans, and much more. Section 15.1 introduces the concept of net present value and its application to decision making. You also see a new concept known as cash flows. Using these techniques you will work through the basic kinds of decision-making scenarios. Section 15.2 then examines other decision characteristics along with an important decision-making measure called the internal rate of return.

    Contributors and Attributions

    This page titled 15.0: Introduction is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jean-Paul Olivier via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.