How to do Time Value of Money on a Ti-83 Plus

This post, while not particularly relevant to things I normally write on here is something I felt necessary to write. In this post I will explain how to do time value of money (TVM) calculations on a Ti-83 Plus (which I assume is same for a Ti-83). The reason being, I find it ridiculous that finance professors ask you to purchase an entirely different calculator after most every student (at least for business) has already purchased an expensive Ti-83 for calculus. I am doing this in hopes of saving at least a few college students the $30 that the new calculator would cost. May those of you who saved the $30 use it on something interesting… like on your girlfriend (or your next date), a healthy dinner (for once), a ridiculously priced text-book, or to continue to feed your drinking problem.

How to do TVM on a Ti-83 Plus

Firstly, get familiar with the following process:

1. Turn on your calculator
2. Press “Apps”
3. Press “Finance”
4. Press “TVM Solver”

The TVM Solver is the place where you will always be going to to enter in the values for your calculation. That said, you will see the following variables when you go to the TVM Solver.

N = # of years.
I% = The % interest (or discount if you’re receiving money you) you are expecting.
PV = Initial Investment (this number should be negative if you are investing, as you’re giving your investing your money).
FV = Future value
PMT = Number of payments per period (period set below).
P/Y = Periods per year (should generally be one).
BEGIN = You should have your Ti-83 be on “END” by default, but you will want to change it to begin when dealing with annuity due.
END = You want to have this set when dealing with ordinary annuity.

Examples of using TVM Solver to do financial calculations

Now you know a little about what those numbers mean. Let’s take a look at what numbers we put where to do what.

Question 1:
We want to invest $1000 today and want it to be $5000 10 years from now. What is the interest rate we need to accomplish this?

To calculate this we will go to TVM Solver (Apps -> Finance -> TVM Solver) and set the listed variables to the following:

N = 10
I% = 0 (because we don’t know what the interest rate is)
PV = -1000 (negative 1000 because that’s how much we’re investing)
PMT = 0 (no additional payments being paid / period )
FV = 5000 (this is how much we want to have by the end of 10 years)
P/Y = 1

After entering in all that, hid “2nd” then “Mode” to take you back to your main display screen. Next, press “Apps”, “Finance” and then from the list find “TVM_I%” and press it.
Your result should be 17.46%
This means that if you invest $1000 today and want $5000 in 10 years from now, the interest rate you must have is 17.46%.

Question 2:
What must I invest now at 8% to get $5000 10 years from now?

Setting up our variables in TVM_Solver again:

N = 10 (10 years)
I% = 8 (enter whole numbers, TVM Solver converts it to .08 for you)
PV = 0 (0 because we want to know how much to invest to get $5000)
PMT = 0 (no additional payments being paid / period )
FV = 5000 (this is how much we want to have by the end of 10 years)
P/Y = 1

After entering in all that, hid “2nd” then “Mode” to take you back to your main display screen. Next, press “Apps”, “Finance” and then from the list find “TVM_PV” and press it.
Your result should be -2315.96
This means that if you invest (so you’re investing, thus no longer in your position, which is why it’s negative) $2315.96 today at 8%, in 10 years you will have $5000.

Basically the way it works is everything under “TVM_Solver” in the Apps -> Finance section of your calculator is a function that does a calculation based off of the values entered in TVM_Solver. So, to calculate something like the number of payments necessary, you’d fill in the necessary data in TVM_Solver, setting PMT to 0, and then running TVM_PMT.

Hope this helps some people. Feel free to comment to this with any questions.

Your community is a privilege

The community that supports your company is a privilege, not a chore.

As I have been doing much in the way of online community building as of late, one thing I have been noticing is that businesses tend to treat the community that supports them as a chore more than a privilege.

When you treat your community (customers) like they’re just part of a chore, they can tell. They can tell because you’re still focused on yourself. It’s not about your business, it’s about your customers, and the community those customers create which may or may not choose to support your business.

When business’s treat their community like a privilege rather than a right, they won’t be needing fake antics to encourage potential additions to the community that supports them.

Will Tango For Tulips

My ‘brother’ who is quite hilarious has recently started a blog. It’s called Will Tango For Tulips. It consists of his stories, hilarious haiku’s, and more. He’s also brought me over to give me a place where I can post my more random and odd comments, excerpts, and so forth. So business stuff will be here, my oddities will be at Will Tango For Tulips.

I encourage you all to check it out.

Nikon Begins to Join With Their Community

In a past post of mine on Orion Telescopes & Binoculars I wrote about how they aught to really consider empowering their community (customer base). That any businesses’ community is ultimately more powerful and more creative than the business itself can be. Not only that, but by empowering your community you join with them, you make them more loyal, you get closer to them, you give them something to talk about, and you may even save money you can then spend to work with your community even more.

While Orion may not be listening, Nikon certainly is. Nikon recently did some similar activities as to what I mentioned in my Orion post. I found this out while I was reading the Jaffe Juice blog and came across his recent post on Nikon sending some Flickr users their camera which Nikon would then use in a spread of theirs. Fantastic. Lovely. Joining with the community seems frightening at first, but it is so much more enjoyable.

Edit: This was also covered over on TechCrunch.

E-Commerce Wants of ~45 College Students

I had written more stuff but a memory dump made me lose it all. So here’s short and to the point:

The e-commerce web design wants of approximately 45 college e-commerce consumers. This is in no particular order and the ones that came up more than once are in bold.

• Easily search-able site

• Easily identifiable price & shipping

• Easy to find price & shipping

• Step by step and easy to understand order process

• Customer Reviews

• Easy, clear, and simple website

• Customer Support that responds to the customer no matter what the message is about.

• Secured checkout (That little green url bar does matter)

• Suggested products/Customer Recommendations (“Customers who bought this also bought X”)

• Quick checkout option

• Sales put on the main page

• Large fonts (I’m assuming this lends itself to ‘easy to read’)

• Product/service categories that make sense to the customer

• Contact info

• A company’s mission statement (Eg: An “About” page)

• Knowing where the links on the site will take you (the “title” style for css lends to this)

• Shopping list where you can save items to purchase later

• Packaged deals

• Easy to modify items in your shopping cart even if it’s something as small as the color shirt you want to purchase.

• This product was purchased X times (This was one of my ideas, but i was surprised how many students liked it).

Now consider how many of these things Amazon does, and how many things in addition to this they do. It’s no wonder they’re doing so well. One thing in addition to this that’s interesting is eye tracking research that shows people read in an F shaped pattern when reading web content.

Interesting Things To Do This Week

I think it’s important to be creative, adventerous, innovative, and risky.

To Do List for the week:

1. Eat 1 million peanuts.
2. Clone a Cup (I could use a few more)
3. Buy A Katana (they look so cool)
4. Dice vegetables Iron Chef style with newly purchased Katana

It’s Okay to Charge for a Product

I read a great blog post a few days back over at Signal vs. Noise which really hit home for me. The blog post is basically addressing the new ‘fad’ of not charging for your product, and the fact that people who have a vested monetary interest in your product are going to be a greater evangelist for your product. The key in all of this was said at the end, quite nicely:

“Don’t be afraid to charge for your product. People are excited to pay for things they find valuable — just go down to the mall and look at all the shopping bags.”

This is something that really needs to start hitting home with more people than just myself, I think. Over at Freakanomics blog I read a post about a company who is not planning on charging for their service. It sounds like they have some other ideas in mind, which could potentially be profitable. But it also sounds a bit uncertain to me.

I do various volunteer and non-volunteer work in my free time (what little of it I have left now due to the semester). One of which is working with the RenWerX Development Team on a game we’re producing for the PC called Ascension. When I first joined the team I asked about whether we planned on selling the game. The answer then, and still the answer now is a resounding “No.” Now, we do have donations setup, so one could argue that those who would purchase the game are those that would donate anyways, but I think the notion of “donating” is different enough from “purchasing something of value” to cause us to get much less donations then we would purchases if we sold the game. Either way, I don’t have much of a monetary investment in the team, so charging for the game isn’t a big concern for me. But this also means we have to work harder at creating dedicated evangelists than if we had people with a more invested interest (and actually i’ve been developing ways for people in our community to have a non-monetary invested interest).

It seems to me people need to start building e-businesses around concepts that are valuable enough to cause customers to purchase them and become an evangelistic part of that companies community [duh, right? Look at all the people who aren't doing it].

Do Desserts Look Appealing?

Before I came down to college here I took a trip with my parents along the outer banks. During this trip I had the chance to eat at quite a few restaurants, but there was one thing in particular that repeatedly caught my attention (a lot of things caught my attention, beautiful girls, the waiter skills, etc) and that was the desserts.

At three of the restaurants I ate at, I noticed they did a fantastic job describing their desserts. Out of the seven people I observed (yes, i discretely observe patrons), five of them asked to see the dessert menu. What’s interesting is that these restaurants with great dessert copy didn’t bring the menu back out, they brought out a tray with all of their desserts instead.

Initially I thought this was a great idea… until I noticed the reactions. Out of the 5 people (one including my own mother) only two actually bought a dessert after being showed the tray, both of which were very large groups. The others, who seemed genuinely seem interested (they asked for the menu, after all) declined after seeing the dessert tray – which had freshly prepared dessert on it.

What I think happened is that the people were enticed by the well written descriptions of the desserts. They had some wonderful image in their mind of how it looked, smelled, and tasted – all occurring before they ate. After they finished their meal, they still had this delightful dessert image in their mind with no real idea of its size, shape, taste, etc. so they asked for the dessert menu.

The problem is when the tray is brought over, two things occur. First, the fantastic picture they painted in ther mind of the dessert no longer matches what they’re seeing. The smell, texture, and look are now defined. Second, they saw the actual size and the dessert itself. Having just ate, it may have seemed like too much.

I am still very curious as to whether my assumptions are correct and plan to try testing this at a restaurant nearby soon… I just need to find a manager willing to try it. I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult as it’s important to always be thinking of how you can improve the way you do business.