Money and Business Tools

The rate you type is most of the answer

The English edition of this category is built around one calculator. The compound interest calculator projects a balance forward from a starting amount and a regular contribution, and works backwards from a target to the monthly deposit that reaches it. Both directions come from two standard terms, the future value of a lump sum and of an annuity, and the page fetches no market or product data at any point.

That last part matters: the annual return is not a quote, it is a figure you type, and it moves the result more than anything else on screen. Three habits keep the output honest.

• Run it twice: once at the return you hope for, once two points lower. The gap between the balances shows how much of the projection rests on the assumption rather than on your deposits.
• Read the split, not the total: the results separate what you contributed from what growth added. Only the first is a decision you make again next month.
• Discount for inflation: an inflation assumption restates the balance in today’s prices, because a large number thirty years out does not buy what it buys now.

Tax, fees and currency conversion are excluded, as is any income you spend instead of reinvesting. The page is arithmetic on your assumptions: it recommends no product, fund or strategy, and it is not advice about whether to invest.

Why the other calculators here are in Chinese only

This category is shorter in English than in Chinese by decision, not backlog. The other money tools here encode Taiwanese rules closely enough that a translated version would be wrong for a reader anywhere else.

• Payroll and take-home pay deducts Labor Insurance and National Health Insurance against published insured-salary bands rather than as a percentage of pay, then applies Taiwanese tax brackets.
• Severance pay counts service years, notice periods and unused annual leave under the Labor Standards Act, citing the article number beside each figure.
• The mortgage calculator carries the tiered subsidised rate of a government housing loan programme that exists only in Taiwan.
• The receipt lottery checker matches numbers drawn every two months under the uniform invoice lottery, which has no direct equivalent abroad.
• The exchange rate converter quotes Bank of Taiwan board rates, which list cash and spot prices separately on the buy and sell side.
• Amounts in Chinese numerals writes a figure the way cheques and contracts require it in Chinese, which is no use in a Latin-script document.

Translating those would mean guessing at another country’s tax bands and labour law, so they stay in Chinese, next to the documents they follow. Any calculator not tied to one jurisdiction can be translated, and appears in the money and business list at the top of this page when it is.

Currency, privacy and where the detail lives

Amounts are plain numbers with thousands separators and no currency symbol, so read them as dollars, pounds or euros; the arithmetic does not care, as long as every box uses the same currency.

The calculation runs in your browser. Your starting amount, contributions, assumed return and target never leave the device, there is no account, and nothing is written into the address bar, so a copied link carries the tool and not your numbers. The developer tools are built the same way, which is why tokens and payloads can be pasted into them.

Anything deeper lives on the tool page: the formula in full, the equivalent spreadsheet functions and their sign convention, and why two honest calculators can differ by a few percent over twenty years.

Common questions