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| Introduction | |
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| About This Book | |
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| Conventions Used in This Book | |
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| What You're Not to Read | |
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| Foolish Assumptions | |
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| How This Book Is Organized | |
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| Icons Used in This Book | |
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| Where to Go from Here | |
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| Reviewing Basic Math for Business and Real Estate Transactions | |
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| Starting from the Beginning | |
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| Fracturing the Myths about Fractions, Decimals, and Percents | |
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| Capitalizing on Patterns in Formulas | |
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| Finding the Power in Exponents | |
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| Doing Some Serious Counting | |
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| Painting a Pretty Picture | |
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| Fractions, Decimals, and Percents | |
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| Changing from Fractions to Decimals | |
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| Considering the two types of decimals | |
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| Rounding decimals up or down | |
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| Converting Decimals to Fractions | |
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| Ending up with terminating decimals | |
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| Dealing with repeating decimals | |
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| Understanding the Relationship between Percents and Decimals | |
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| Transforming from percents to decimals | |
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| Moving from decimals to percents | |
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| Dealing with more than 100% | |
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| Coming to Grips with Fractions | |
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| Adding and subtracting fractions | |
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| Multiplying and dividing fractions | |
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| Determining Percent Increase and Decrease | |
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| Working with Percent Increase | |
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| Computing new totals with increases | |
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| Determining the percent increase | |
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| Solving for the original amount | |
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| Looking into Percent Decrease | |
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| Finding new totals with decreases | |
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| Figuring out the percent decrease | |
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| Restoring the original price from a decreased price | |
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| Dealing with Proportions and Basic Algebra | |
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| Setting Up Proportions | |
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| Solving Proportions for Missing Values | |
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| Setting up and solving | |
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| Interpolating when necessary | |
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| Handling Basic Linear Equations | |
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| Comparing Values with Variation | |
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| Getting right to it with direct variation | |
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| Going the indirect route with indirect variation | |
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| Taking Intriguing Math to Work | |
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| Working with Formulas | |
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| Familiarizing Yourself with a Formula | |
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| Identifying variables and replacing them correctly | |
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| Adjusting for differing units | |
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| Recognizing operations | |
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| Simplifying and Solving a Formula | |
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| Operating according to the order of operations | |
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| Making sure what you have makes sense | |
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| Computing with Technology | |
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| Calculators: Holding the answer in the palm of your hand | |
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| Repeating operations: Simplifying your work with a computer spreadsheet | |
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| Reading Graphs and Charts | |
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| Organizing Scattered Information with a Scatter Plot | |
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| Lining Up Data with Line Graphs | |
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| Creating a line graph | |
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| Indicating gaps in graph values | |
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| Measuring Frequency with Histograms | |
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| Taking a Piece of a Pie Chart | |
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| Dividing the circle with degrees and percents | |
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| Measuring the World around You | |
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| Converting from Unit to Unit | |
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| Using the conversion proportion | |
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| Lining up the linear measures | |
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| Spreading out with measures of area | |
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| Adding a third dimension: Volume | |
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| Making Sense of the Metric System | |
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| Moving from one metric unit to another | |
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| Converting from metric to English and vice versa | |
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| Discovering How to Properly Measure Lumber | |
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| Measuring Angles by Degrees | |
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| Breaking down a degree | |
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| Fitting angles into polygons | |
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| Analyzing Data and Statistics | |
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| Organizing Raw Data | |
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| Creating a frequency distribution | |
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| Grouping values together in a frequency distribution | |
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| Finding the Average | |
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| Adding and dividing to find the mean | |
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| Locating the middle with the median | |
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| Understanding how frequency affects the mode | |
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| Factoring in Standard Deviation | |
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| Computing the standard deviation | |
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| Discovering the Math of Finance and Investments | |
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| Computing Simple and Compound Interest | |
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| Understanding the Basics of Interest | |
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| Simply Delightful: Working with Simple Interest | |
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| Computing simple interest amounts the basic way | |
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| Stepping it up a notch: Computing it all with one formula | |
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| Taking time into account with simple interest | |
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| Surveying some special rules for simple interest | |
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| Looking into the future with present value | |
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| Getting to Know Compound Interest | |
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| Figuring the amount of compound interest you've earned | |
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| Noting the difference between effective and nominal rates | |
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| Finding present value when interest is compounding | |
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| Determining How Variable Changes Affect Money Accumulation | |
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| Comparing rate increases to increased compounding | |
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| Comparing rate increases to increases in time | |
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| Investing in the Future | |
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| Calculating Investments Made with Lump Sums | |
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| Reading interest earnings from a table | |
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| Doubling your money, doubling your fun | |
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| Going the Annuity Route | |
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| Preparing your financial future with a sinking fund | |
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| Determining the payment amount | |
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| Finding the present value of an annuity | |
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| Computing the Payout from an Annuity | |
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| Receiving money from day one | |
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| Deferring the annuity payment | |
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| Understanding and Managing Investments | |
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| Interpreting the Daily Stock Market Quotations | |
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| Getting to know the stock quotations | |
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| Computing percent change | |
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| Using the averages to compute prices | |
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| Wrangling with the Ratios | |
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| Examining the stock yield ratio | |
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| Earning respect for the PE ratio | |
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| Working with earnings per share | |
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| Calculating profit ratios | |
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| Making Use of Your Broker | |
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| Buying stocks on margin | |
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| Paying a commission | |
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| Investing in the public: Buying bonds | |
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| Using Loans and Credit to Make Purchases | |
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| Taking Note of Promissory and Discount Notes | |
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| Facing up to notes that have full face value | |
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| Discounting the value of a promissory note | |
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| Borrowing with a Conventional Loan | |
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| Computing the amount of loan payments | |
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| Considering time and rate | |
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| Determining the remaining balance | |
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| Paying more than required each month | |
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| Working with Installment Loans | |
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| Calculating the annual percentage rate | |
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| Making purchases using an installment plan | |
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| Putting Math to Use in Banking and Payroll | |
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| Managing Simple Bank Accounts | |
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| Doing Business with Banks | |
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| Exploring the types of business bank accounts available | |
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| Understanding the importance of account management | |
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| Balancing Act: How You and the Bank Use Your Account Balance | |
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| Computing your average daily balance | |
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| Determining interest using your daily balance | |
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| Reconciling Your Account | |
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| Making reconciliation simple | |
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| Finding the errors | |
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| Protecting Against Risk with Insurance | |
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| Surveying the Types of Insurance Available | |
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| Living It Up with Life Insurance | |
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| Insuring with a group | |
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| Protecting your business with endowment insurance | |
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| Protecting Yourself from Loss by Insuring Your Property | |
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| Considering coinsurance | |
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| Examining multiyear contracts | |
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| Taking advantage of multiple building insurance coverage | |
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| Deferring premium payments | |
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| Planning for Success with Budgets | |
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| Choosing the Right Type of Budget | |
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| Cashing In on Cash Budgets | |
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| Looking at an example cash budget | |
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| Comparing budgeted and actual cash receipts | |
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| Varying with a Flexible Budget | |
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| Budgeting Across the Months | |
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| Using revenue budgets to deal with staggered income | |
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| Budgeting for ample inventory | |
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| Measuring Differences with Variance Analysis | |
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| Computing variance and percent variance | |
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| Finding a range for variance | |
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| Dealing with Payroll | |
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| Pay Up: Calculating Employee Earnings | |
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| Dividing to determine a timely paycheck | |
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| Part-timers: Computing the salary of seasonal and temporary workers | |
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| Determining an hourly wage | |
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| Taking care of commission payments | |
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| Subtracting Payroll Deductions | |
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| Computing federal income tax | |
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| Determining Social Security contributions | |
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| Successfully Handling the Math Used in the World of Goods and Services | |
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| Pricing with Markups and Discounts | |
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| Examining Markups and Retail Prices | |
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| Making sense of markups | |
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| Understanding how markups are a percentage of retail prices | |
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| Working with the retail price | |
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| Exploring Discount Pricing | |
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| Discounting once | |
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| Successive or multiple discounts | |
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| Going for a volume discount | |
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| Calculating Profit, Revenue, and Cost | |
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| Figuring Profit from Revenue and Cost | |
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| Understanding how volume affects profit, revenue, and cost | |
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| Seeing how price is sensitive to demand | |
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| Sorting out variable and fixed costs | |
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| What's It Gonna Be? Projecting Cost | |
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| Dividing up direct and indirect costs | |
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| Weighing historical and differential cost | |
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| Determining Break-Even Volume | |
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| Solving for break-even volume with a formula | |
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| Working out break-even volume from historical data | |
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| Accounting for Overhead and Depreciation | |
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| Keeping an Eye on Overhead Costs | |
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| Working with order-getting costs | |
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| Deciding on allocation options | |
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| Getting the Lowdown on Depreciation | |
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| The straight-line method | |
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| The sum-of-the-years' digits method | |
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| The declining balance method | |
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| Keeping Track of Inventory | |
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| Controlling Inventory and Turnover | |
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| Comparing cost inventory and retail inventory | |
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| Estimating turnover with an inventory ratio | |
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| FIFO and LIFO: Giving Order to Inventory | |
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| Determining Economic Order Quantity | |
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| Surviving the Math for Business Facilities and Operations | |
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| Measuring Properties | |
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| Exploring Area and Perimeter Formulas for Different Figures | |
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| Rectangles | |
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| Squares | |
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| Parallelograms | |
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| Triangles | |
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| Trapezoids | |
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| Regular polygons | |
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| Circles | |
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| Ellipses | |
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| Squaring Off with Square Measurements | |
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| Figuring total area in various measurements | |
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| Adjusting for increased area | |
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| Taking frontage into consideration | |
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| Calculating acreage | |
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| Determining Cost per Foot | |
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| Renting space | |
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| Estimating building costs | |
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| Measuring Irregular Spaces | |
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| Breaking spaces into rectangles | |
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| Trying out triangles | |
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| Tracking trapezoids | |
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| Describing Property with Metes and Bounds | |
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| Surveyors' directions | |
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| Measuring a boundary | |
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| Understanding the Rectangular Survey System | |
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| Basing measures on meridians | |
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| Subdividing the 24-mile square | |
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| Taking Out Mortgages and Property-Related Loans | |
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| Closing In on Closing Costs | |
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| Dealing with down payments | |
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| Paying down using points | |
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| Considering appraisal fees | |
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| Prorating property tax | |
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| Amortizing Loans with Three Different Methods | |
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| Taking advantage of online calculators | |
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| Consulting mortgage payment tables | |
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| Working your brain with an old-fashioned formula | |
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| Going Off Schedule with Amortized Loans and Mortgages | |
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| Determining how much of your payment is interest | |
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| Altering the payments | |
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| Talking about Borrowing Power | |
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| Investigating Alternative Loans | |
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| Taking out a contract for deed | |
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| Building a construction loan | |
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| The Part of Tens | |
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| Ten Tips for Leasing and Managing Rental Property | |
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| Getting the Full Treatment with a Gross Lease | |
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| Using a Single Net Lease to Get Your Tenant to Share the Expenses | |
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| Signing a Double or Triple Net Lease | |
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| Trying Out a Percentage Lease | |
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| Stepping It Up with a Step Lease | |
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| Inserting Expense Provisions into Your Lease | |
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| Including an Allowance for Improvements in Your Lease | |
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| Protecting Your Lease with a Security Deposit | |
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| Adding a Sublease Clause to Your Commercial Lease | |
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| Deciding Whether You Should Renew, Renegotiate, or Break a Lease | |
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| Ten Things to Watch Out for When Reading Financial Reports | |
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| Apologies for Shortfalls | |
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| Blurring in the Overall Picture | |
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| Wishy-Washy Descriptions of Trends | |
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| An Overabundance of Footnotes | |
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| Listings of the Directors | |
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| Uncollected Revenues | |
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| A High Working Capital | |
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| Long-Term Debt | |
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| Low Profit Margins | |
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| Warning Words | |
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| Index | |