By Brent Pritchard

As a parent who is helping a child through college (in part because she recognizes higher education as her investment, not mine), there’s one surefire way to tell if you got more out of what you paid for your finance education.

Here’s an excerpt from my book Would Your Boomerang Return? What Birds, Hurdlers, and Boomerangs Can Teach Us About the Time Value of Money (2023):

My Time Value of Money lesson has always been the one that packs the biggest punch, both in terms of important information and unfortunately knocking down some students’ self-confidence. In addition to being foundational to finance, historically this lesson was also the one that left some of my students with the deer-in-the-headlights look, made some students jittery in their seats, and in some cases put students on the border of becoming fighting mad.

Now if there’s one building block Time Value of Money equation that punches above its weight, this is it:

Some might recognize the dot of the “i” as the snowball of compound interest.

When do you remember learning about the building block True Investment Yield equation?

Brent Pritchard is an author and college finance lecturer with over two decades of industry experience and cofounder of Boxholm Press, LLC, a family-owned-and-operated publishing company providing educational content, products, and services. He pioneers an innovative and approachable new way of learning and teaching the Time Value of Money as well as thought leadership in other business topics. His most recent book is Would Your Boomerang Return? You can contact him on his website here.