Mortgage Loan Foundations: The Time Value of Money 按揭贷款:资金的时间价值 This chapter introduces and illustrates the mathematics of compound interest in financial analysis. Although this may be a review for many readers, a thorough understanding of this topic is essential in real estate finance. The concepts and techniques we introduce in this chapter are used throughout the remainder of this text to solve a variety of problems encountered in real estate finance. In the following two chapters, we apply the mathematics of finance to the calculation of mortgage payments and the effective cost of various alternative mortgage instruments. Later, we apply the mathematics of finance to the analysis of income property investments. This chapter illustrates the use of financial tables, interest factors, and how these tables and factors can be found using a financial calculator. These tables are included to help the reader to understand the process of compounding, discounting, and finding internal rates of return by using interest factors. The tables are not necessary to solve any of the problems in the remainder of the book. In fact, an alternative calculator solution is also provided for many of the problems. The interest factor solutions are shown only so that the readers can see the mathematics behind the calculator solutions. As we move toward more advanced material, it is assumed that readers can obtain the solutions using a financial calculator or by using a spreadsheet program on a personal computer.