Problem
You want to put away a sum of money annually at a given interest rate in order to achieve a specific future value to cover a known upcoming expense. You need to know how much to put away each year.
Solution
Use the PMT function.
Discussion
By way of example, let's assume you need $150,000 in 15 years' time and you want to invest a sum of money annually to raise this money. You're confident you can get an annual interest rate on your investment of 7.6%. How much do you invest each year?
You can use the PMT function (see Recipe 14.5) to compute the annual amount to invest. The formula =PMT(0.076, 15, 0, 150000, 0) returns a payment value for this example of $5,698.76 per year.
See Also
See Recipe 14.5 for more information on the syntax for PMT.
Using Excel
Getting Acquainted with Visual Basic for Applications
Collecting and Cleaning Up Data
Charting
Statistical Analysis
Time Series Analysis
Mathematical Functions
Curve Fitting and Regression
Solving Equations
Numerical Integration and Differentiation
Solving Ordinary Differential Equations
Solving Partial Differential Equations
Performing Optimization Analyses in Excel
Introduction to Financial Calculations
Index