Double Your Money: The Rule of 72The Rule of 72 is a quick and simple technique for estimating one of two things: Show
The rule states that an investment or a cost will double when: [Investment Rate per year as a percent] x [Number of Years] = 72. When interest is compounded annually, a single amount will double in each of the following situations: The Rule of 72 indicates than an investment earning 9% per year compounded annually will double in 8 years. The rule also means if you want your money to double in 4 years, you need to find an investment that earns 18% per year compounded annually. You can confirm the rationality of the Rule of 72 as follows: Find factors on the FV of 1 Table that are close to 2.000. (The factor of 2.000 tells you that the present value of 1.000 had doubled to the future value of 2.000.) When you find a factor close to 2.000, look at the interest rate at the top of the column and look at the number of periods (n) in the far left column of the row containing the factor. Multiply that interest rate times the number of periods and you will get the product 72. To use the Rule of 72 in order to determine the approximate length of time it will take for your money to double, simply divide 72 by the annual interest rate. For example, if the interest rate earned is 6%, it will take 12 years (72 divided by 6) for your money to double. If you want your money to double every 8 years, you will need to earn an interest rate of 9% (72 divided by 8). Here's another way to demonstrate that the Rule of 72 works. Assume you make a single deposit of $1,000 to an account and wish for it to grow to a future value of $2,000 in nine years. What annual interest rate compounded annually will the account have to pay? The Rule of 72 indicates that the rate must be 8% (72 divided by 9 years). Let's verify the rate with the format we used with the FV Table: To finish solving the equation, we search only the "n = 9" row of the FV of 1 Table for the FV factor that is closest to 2.000. The factor closest to 2.000 in the row where n = 9 is 1.999 and it is in the column where i = 8%. An investment at 8% per year compounded annually for 9 years will cause the investment to double (8 x 9 = 72). Learning Outcomes
We have to work with money every day. While balancing your checkbook or calculating your monthly expenditures on espresso requires only arithmetic, when we start saving, planning for retirement, or need a loan, we need more mathematics. Simple InterestDiscussing 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. Simple One-time Interest(1)
ExamplesA friend asks to borrow $300 and agrees to repay it in 30 days with 3% interest. How much interest will you earn? Solution:
The following video works through this example in detail. One-time simple interest is only common for extremely short-term loans. For longer term loans, it is common for interest to be paid on a daily, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. In that case, interest would be earned regularly. For example, bonds are essentially a loan made to the bond issuer (a company or government) by you, the bond holder. In return for the loan, the issuer agrees to pay interest, often annually. Bonds have a maturity date, at which time the issuer pays back the original bond value. ExercisesSuppose your city is building a new park, and issues bonds to raise the money to build it. You obtain a $1,000 bond that pays 5%
interest annually that matures in 5 years. How much interest will you earn? Further explanation about solving this example can be seen here. We can generalize this idea of simple interest over time. Simple Interest over Time(4)
The units of measurement (years, months, etc.) for the time should match the time period for the interest rate.
APR – Annual Percentage RateInterest rates are usually given as an annual percentage rate (APR) – the total interest that will be paid in the year. If the interest is paid in smaller time increments, the APR will be divided up. For example, a 6% APR paid monthly would be divided into twelve 0.5% payments. A 4% annual rate paid quarterly would be divided into four 1% payments. ExampleTreasury Notes (T-notes) are bonds issued by the federal government to cover its expenses. Suppose you obtain a $1,000 T-note with a 4% annual rate, paid semi-annually, with a maturity in 4 years. How much interest will you earn? Solution: Since interest is being paid semi-annually (twice a year), the 4% interest will be divided into two 2% payments.
This video explains the solution. Try ItA loan company charges $30 interest for a one month loan of $500. Find the annual interest rate they are charging. Solution: I = $30 of
interest r = unknown t = 1 month Using , we get . Solving, we get r = 0.06, or 6%. Since the time was monthly, this is the monthly interest. The annual rate would be 12 times this: 72% interest.Compound InterestWith 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. Suppose that we deposit $1000 in a bank account offering 3% interest, compounded monthly. How will our money grow? The 3% interest is an annual percentage rate (APR) – the total interest to be paid during the year. Since interest is being paid monthly, each month, we will earn 3% ÷ 12 = 0.25% per month. In the first month,
In the first month, we will earn $2.50 in interest, raising our account balance to $1002.50. In the second month,
Notice that in the second month we earned more interest than we did in the first month. This is because we earned interest not only on the original $1000 we deposited, but we also earned interest on the $2.50 of interest we earned the first month. This is the key advantage that compounding interest gives us. Calculating out a few more months gives the following:
We want to simplify the process for calculating compounding, because creating a table like the one above is time consuming. Luckily, math is good at giving you ways to take shortcuts. To find an equation to represent this, if Pm represents the amount of money after m months, then we could write the recursive equation: P0 = $1000 Pm = (1+0.0025)Pm-1 You probably recognize this as the recursive form of exponential growth. If not, we go through the steps to build an explicit equation for the growth in the next example. ExampleBuild an explicit equation for the growth of $1000 deposited in a bank account offering 3% interest, compounded monthly. Solution:
Observing a pattern, we could conclude
Notice that the $1000 in the equation was P0, the starting amount. We found 1.0025 by adding one to the growth rate divided by 12, since we were compounding 12 times per year. Generalizing our result, we could write In this formula:
View this video for a walkthrough of the concept of compound interest. While this formula works fine, it is more common to use a formula that involves the number of years, rather than the number of compounding periods. If N is the number of years, then m = N k. Making this change gives us the standard formula for compound interest. Compound Interest
The most important thing to remember about using this formula is that it assumes that we put money in the account once and let it sit there earning interest. In the next example, we show how to use the compound interest formula to find the balance on a certificate of deposit after 20 years. ExampleA certificate of deposit (CD) is a savings instrument that many banks offer. It usually gives a higher interest rate, but you cannot access your investment for a specified length of time. Suppose you deposit $3000 in a CD paying 6% interest, compounded monthly. How much will you have in the account after 20 years? Solution: In this example,
So (round your answer to the nearest penny)A video walkthrough of this example problem is available below. Let us compare the amount of money earned from compounding against the amount you would earn from simple interest
As you can see, over a long period of time, compounding makes a large difference in the account balance. You may recognize this as the difference between linear growth and exponential growth. Evaluating exponents on the Desmos calculatorWhen we need to calculate something like it is easy enough to just multiply . But when we need to calculate something like , it would be very tedious to calculate this by multiplying by itself times! So to make things easier, we can harness the power of our scientific calculators. In this class, we are using the Desmos calculator. If you just want to square a number, the key is a2. If you want to raise a number to another power, you use the key ab on the main menu.To evaluate we’d type 1.005 ab 240 . Try it out – you should get the answer in the figure below:Most scientific calculators have a button for exponents. If you are not using the Desmos calculator, it is typically either labeled like: ^ , , or .ExampleYou know that you will need $40,000 for your child’s education in 18 years. If your account earns 4% compounded quarterly, how much would you need to deposit now to reach your goal? Solution: In this example, we’re looking for P0.
In this case, we’re going to have to set up the equation, and solve for P0. (7) So you would need to deposit $19,539.84 now to have $40,000 in 18 years. RoundingIf you are not inputting your entire formula into Desmos and choose to do it section by section, It is important to be very careful about rounding when calculating things with exponents. In general, you want to keep as many decimals during calculations as you can. Be sure to keep at least 3 significant digits (numbers after any leading zeros). Rounding 0.00012345 to 0.000123 will usually give you a “close enough” answer, but keeping more digits is always better. ExampleTo see why not over-rounding is so important, if you choose not to enter your formula all at once into Desmos, suppose you were investing $1000 at 5% interest compounded monthly for 30 years.
If we first compute r/k, we find 0.05/12 = 0.00416666666667 Here is the effect of rounding this to different values:
If you’re working in a bank, of course you wouldn’t round at all. For our purposes, the answer we got by rounding to 0.00417, three significant digits, is close enough – $5 off of $4500 isn’t too bad. Certainly keeping that fourth decimal place wouldn’t have hurt. View the following for a demonstration of this example. Using your Desmos calculatorIn many cases, you can avoid rounding completely by how you enter things in your calculator. For example, in the example above, we needed to calculate We can quickly calculate this on the Desmos Calculator by putting in the formula all at once: To enter this into the calculator, type in the following: 1000 * (1 + .05/12) ab (12 * 30) Note: ab is in the first row, second column of the main menu above. Now you can round your final answer to the nearest cent. Attributions This chapter contains material taken from Math in Society (on OpenTextBookStore) by David Lippman, and is used under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States (CC BY-SA 3.0 US) license. This chapter contains material taken from of Math for the Liberal Arts (on Lumen Learning) by Lumen Learning, and is used under a CC BY: Attribution license. How long will it take for an amount to become 5 times of itself at 5% per annum simple interest?Thus, it will take 8 years.
What should be interest rate for an amount to become 5 times of itself at simple interest in 50 years?Rate=P×T100×SI=15100×4x=15400=26.
At what rate of simple interest will a sum of money become five times of itself in 12 years?100 becomes 500; Rate=TimeInterest=12400=33. 3%
At what rate of simple interest will a sum of money double itself in 8 years?5% Was this answer helpful?
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