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Mathematics LibreTexts

7: Finance

  • Page ID
    59963
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    • 7.1: Simple Interest
      Discussing interest starts with the principal, or amount your account starts with. This could be a starting investment, or the starting amount of a loan. Interest, in its most simple form, is calculated as a percent of the principal. For example, if you borrowed $100 from a friend and agree to repay it with 5% interest, then the amount of interest you would pay would just be 5% of 100: $100(0.05) = $5. The total amount you would repay would be $105, the original principal plus the interest.
    • 7.2: Compound Interest
      With simple interest, we were assuming that we pocketed the interest when we received it. In a standard bank account, any interest we earn is automatically added to our balance, and we earn interest on that interest in future years. This reinvestment of interest is called compounding.
    • 7.3: Annuities
      For most of us, we aren’t able to put a large sum of money in the bank today. Instead, we save for the future by depositing a smaller amount of money from each paycheck into the bank. This idea is called a savings annuity. Most retirement plans like 401k plans or IRA plans are examples of savings annuities.
    • 7.4: Payout Annuities
      In the last section, you learned about annuities. In an annuity, you start with nothing, put money into an account on a regular basis, and end up with money in your account. In this section, we will learn about a variation called a payout annuity. With a payout annuity, you start with money in the account and pull money out of the account on a regular basis. Any remaining money in the account earns interest. After a fixed amount of time, the account will end up empty.
    • 7.5: Loans
      In the last section, you learned about payout annuities. In this section, you will learn about conventional loans (also called amortized loans or installment loans). Examples include auto loans and home mortgages. These techniques do not apply to payday loans, add-on loans, or other loan types where the interest is calculated up front.
    • 7.6: Remaining Loan Balance
      With loans, it is often desirable to determine what the remaining loan balance will be after some number of years. For example, if you purchase a home and plan to sell it in five years, you might want to know how much of the loan balance you will have paid off and how much you have to pay from the sale. To determine the remaining loan balance, we can think “how much of the loan will these loan payments be able to pay off in the remaining time on the loan?”
    • 7.7: Solving For Time
      Often, we are interested in how long it will take to accumulate money or how long we’d need to extend a loan to bring payments down to a reasonable level. Note that this section assumes you’ve covered solving exponential equations using logarithms, either in prior classes or in the growth models chapter.
    • 7.8: Exercises
      This page contains 40 exercise problems related to the material from Chapter 7.


    This page titled 7: Finance is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Darlene Diaz (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.