It’s finals week at BYU, so Kyra’s sitting in bed working on the test for her Personal Finance class. It has questions like “Steve bought a car for $15,500 with a 4-year loan at 3.9%. What are his monthly payments?”
She has a magic calculator that lets you enter things like “present value”, interest rate, and loan term, and it’s supposed to spit out the monthly payment. But the calculator itself is pretty confusing, and since she was getting frustrated I offered to help. I couldn’t figure it out either, and eventually downloaded the manual for the calculator to see if I could get it to accept the right inputs.
Both of us plugged in numbers but couldn’t match any of the multiple-choice answers on the test. She decided it felt pretty much like this:
