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Capital Budgeting and the Time Value of Money

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The time value of money: The underlying principle is that a dollar worth today is worth more than a dollar in the future simply because, we can invest that dollar and earn a return on it. When financial managers make key operating decisions, it is certainly important for them to worry about the time value of money simply to understand the worth of a financial decision made by them. It is actually a key metric for the discounted cash-flows model which allows organizations to declare the value of an investment today, based on the expected return from the investment in the future. Importance: The fact of the matter is that capital budgeting is directly linked to time value of money, by that I mean, any investment that the firm intends to make has strategic objectives behind it. All of the investments, not necessarily bring in positive cash-flow in year 0 or year 1. It may be years before the project begins yielding a positive cash-flow. To understand the business perspective of whether or not an investment is worth upfront and whether the cash-flows composes the appropriate vision and direction of the organization. Time value of money is also directly linked to the discount rate, the discount rate is the rate used to convert the future money into present value that is to determine what the value of $1 at the given time in the future is worth today. There are multiple factors that can affect the discount rate some of them are; the interest rate at which a company can borrow money, investment returns on projects, inflation, and the risk of the project itself and so on. This is evidence enough that strategic considerations are directly linked to the time value of money. Many companies need to understand the future worth of their organizations and use such calculations to substantiate to investors in order to raise funds for the organization. Time value of money concept is

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