Practical definitions, worked figures, limits, and source checks for cash planning, investing, taxes and currency.
Portfolio rebalancing restores or moves a portfolio toward a chosen allocation after market movement or cash flows change its weights. A $100,000 60/40 stock-and-bond target can drift t…
Lump-sum investing puts available money to work at once; dollar-cost averaging invests equal portions at regular intervals regardless of market movement. Investing $12,000 immediately g…
CAGR is the constant annual rate that links a beginning value to an ending value over a stated number of years; it hides the path between them and does not by itself handle deposits or …
Profit is revenue minus expenses under an accounting method; cash flow tracks money entering and leaving accounts. A business can report $20,000 of profit after invoicing $100,000 of sa…
Gross margin is gross profit divided by revenue after direct cost of goods or services; net margin is net income divided by revenue after the broader set of expenses. On $100,000 of rev…
Contribution margin subtracts variable costs from sales and shows what an additional sale contributes toward fixed costs and profit; gross margin subtracts cost of goods or services und…
Return on ad spend (ROAS) divides revenue attributed to advertising by ad spend; return on investment (ROI) compares profit or net gain with the full investment cost. A campaign produci…
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is acquisition spending divided by new customers in a defined period; lifetime value (LTV) is an estimate of value from a customer over a named retention…
Inventory turnover measures how many times cost of sales used the average inventory balance during a period; days inventory converts that pace into average days held. Cost of sales of $…
Gross pay is pay earned before taxes and other deductions; net pay is the amount received after those deductions. A $2,000 gross biweekly paycheck with $420 of federal, payroll, state, …
For covered, nonexempt U.S. employees, the federal Fair Labor Standards Act generally requires at least 1.5 times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek. At a $20 regular hour…
Bonus withholding is tax taken from a bonus paycheck during the year; bonus tax is part of the taxpayer's final income-tax liability after the return applies all income, deductions, cre…
Dynamic currency conversion (DCC) is a merchant or ATM conversion that offers to charge a card in the cardholder's home currency instead of the local purchase currency. On a €100 purcha…
An exchange-rate markup is a less favorable conversion rate embedded in the converted amount; a foreign transaction fee is a separate or disclosed charge for a foreign-currency, foreign…
A marginal tax rate is the rate that applies to the next dollar of taxable income within its bracket; an effective tax rate is total tax divided by the chosen income base. In a simplifi…
The Australian Taxation Office's Simple tax calculator works out tax on taxable income, before tax offsets, for a selected Australian income year from 2013-14 through 2025-26; a US payc…
ADP's salary paycheck calculator runs the same gross-to-net sequence any paycheck estimator uses - gross pay minus federal tax, state tax, Social Security, Medicare, and elected deducti…
A currency conversion multiplies an amount by a quoted rate in the direction the rate is stated, or divides by that rate to reverse the conversion; a cross rate between two non-dollar c…
The Federal Reserve's H.10 statistical release publishes daily noon buying rates for major currencies in New York, issued weekly on Mondays at about 4:15 p.m. for the prior business wee…
The European Central Bank publishes euro foreign exchange reference rates for 29 currencies at around 16:00 CET on every working day the TARGET system is open, based on a concertation p…