On Habré regularly appear posts on personal finance systems. These systems are simple, heaped up, beautiful, etc. But! Most of them for some reason completely ignore such a simple thing as compound interest (excuse the pun). But this is the basis of personal finance.
I will give two simple examples, illustrated with tables in Excel. For the seed question: there are two peers: Vasya and Peter. Vasya is a freelancer and he is 22 years old. He began to set aside pieces of dollars a year and put them off until 30 years (only 8 years old). Then a child was born, it became tough with money and he could not postpone it anymore. Petya, on the contrary, could not postpone at the beginning of his career, but at the age of 30 he became a team leader and was finally able to take it to the bank for the same thing every year. He did it right before retirement, i.e. up to 65 years (a total of 36 years). Question: who in 65 years has more money in the account? The correct answer: Vasya, of course.
So, we believe that the money is put in the bank at 10%. Inflation is neglected (it is clear that $ 1000 now and $ 1000 in 20 years may be a little different money, but still). We make a simple calculation and get.

')
Totally, Vasya has $ 388,865 in his account (despite the fact that he invested only $ 8,000), Petit has $ 329,039 (with $ 36,000 invested). As they say draw conclusions. And for reference, $ 1000 per year is a little more than 2.5 thousand rubles per month.
Now the second example (it is also called the Latte rule): programmer Igor Petrovich felt the taste for a good life. He is 30 years old, he earns good money and every morning, going to work, he buys a glass of coffee at Starbucks. Coffee costs about 150 rubles. Since he does this every morning, he spends 365 x 150 = 54,750 rubles on coffee a year. Hera himself, said attentive habrachititel. Dick himself, said Igor Petrovich and stopped drinking coffee on weekends and holidays. Received 250 x 150 = 37,500 per year. Well this is a new iPhone! - said Igor Petrovich and switched to the usual American for 100 rubles per cup. Received 25,000 per year. Then Igor Petrovich scratched his head and sent us in the ass with his math, because the pleasure is above any money.
Again we do a simple calculation:

It turns out that if Igor Petrovich had not drunk his morning coffee and would have set aside 100 rubles a day, by the time he retired he would have 13.5 million rubles. Those. could buy an apartment, for example, a grandson. And so, he traded it for 10,250 cups of coffee. Each of which, by the way, cost him a total of 1,309 rubles per cup.
Good Friday to you,% username :)