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5: Financial Mathematics

  • Page ID
    156218
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    • 5.1: 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.
    • 5.2: 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.
    • 5.3: 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.
    • 5.4: 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.
    • 5.5: 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.


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