Sorry, I thought you were familiar with financial functions. "n" is the
term -- in your case number of years to retirement, assuming you are using
annual payments.

Regards,
Fred.

"tsd" wrote in message
...
Fred,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. You may need to dumb this down a
bit for me though. For some reason, after I imput your formula, Excel
doesn't
recognize the rest. What does "n" stand for?



"Fred Smith" wrote:

The future value of indexed payments, where i is the interest rate, and j
is
the indexing rate, is:

= ((1+i)^n - (1+j)^n) / (i-j)

Regards,
Fred

"tsd" wrote in message
...
I am trying to run a future value out 35 years (a retirement
calculation)
with all constants, except I want the "PMT" to be variable,
specifically,
I
want the payment to be 3% of my salary, indexed each year for inflation
(I
am
using 3.5%). This is not my actual savings, but instead a simulation
comaring
the company's pension contribution versus a 3% contributuion to a 401k.
So
if
my salary is $100,000, in year one, PMT would be $3000, but in year
two,
PMT
would be $3105 (3% of 103,500) and so on. Any advice would be
appreciated.
Thanks!