Lump Sum Investment Calculator

Because "8% compounded annually" and "8% compounded daily" are not the same yield. Annual turns 8% into exactly 8% a year; daily turns it into (1 + 0.08/365)^365 − 1 ≈ 8.328% effective. Over 30 years that gap is real money. This calculator exposes all six conventions — annual, semi-annual, quarterly, monthly, daily, and continuous (e^rt) — and the comparison table shows every one side by side so you can see what your bank or fund actually means.

Fees are a pre-compounding rate drag: net rate = return − fee, so a 0.5% expense ratio over 30 years removes a multi-percent slice of the corpus, not a one-time 0.5% at maturity. Tax is applied to the positive gain only — never to your principal, and never on a loss. Most free calculators tax the whole future value, which is simply wrong. Both are first-class outputs with their own formula-trace lines.

Real future value deflates the nominal corpus by inflation into today's purchasing power: FV / (1 + inflation)^years. A nominal number looks impressive after decades, but if prices roughly tripled over the same period, what it buys is far less. Surfacing the real value alongside the nominal one is the honest way to read a long-horizon projection.

doublingYears = ln(2) / ln(1 + net rate) — the exact, principled version of the Rule of 72, computed for your actual net (after-fee) effective yield rather than the rough divide-72-by-the-rate shortcut. At 8% it is about 9.0 years; the rule-of-72 guess of 9 happens to be close, but the exact figure drifts at higher and lower rates.