How to calculate interest on recurring deposits?

Understand Compound Interest To Understand Recurring Deposit Interest

When you create a RD for Rs. 10,000 for 2 years, what you’re doing is depositing Rs. 10,000 with the bank every month for 24 months, and the bank pays you interest on Rs. 10,000 for 2 years compounding it quarterly, then for the next Rs. 10,000 it pays you interest for 23 months, and so on and so forth.

Banks usually compound interest quarterly, so the first thing is to look at the formula for compound interest.

That formula is as follows:

A formula for calculating annual compound interest is:

                           A=P(1+r/n)^nt

Where,

  A = final amount

  P = principal amount (initial investment)

  r = annual nominal interest rate (as a decimal, not in percentage)

  n = number of times the interest is compounded per year

  t = number of years

In your recurring deposit, you use this formula to calculate the final amount with each installment, and at the end of the installments, you add them all up to get the final amount.

Think of RD Installments and Series of Principal Payments

Let’s take a simple example to understand this – suppose you start a recurring deposit for Rs. 2,000 per month for 1 years at 9.75% compounded quarterly. If you were to see this number as a standalone fixed deposit that you set up every month for 12 months, you could come up with a table like I have here. Before you get to the table, here is a brief explanation on the columns.

 Month: First column is simply the Month.                    

 Principal (P): Second column is P or principal investment which is going to be        the same for 24   months,

 Rate of Interest (r): r is going to 9.75% divided by 100.

 1+r/n: In our case, n is 4 since the interest is compounded quarterly, and 1+r/n is rate divided by compounding periods.

 Months Remaining: This is simply how far away from 2 years you are because that’s how much time your money will grow for.

 Months expressed in year: I’ve created a column for Months expressed in a year since that makes it easy to do the calculation in Excel.

  nt: 4 multiplied by how many months are remaining as expressed in year.

  (1+r/n)^nt: Rate of interest raised by the compounding factor.

  Amount (A): Finally, this is the amount you if you plug in the numbers in a row in the compound interest formula.

So, Rs. 2000 compounded quarterly for 1 years at 9.75% will yield Rs. 25295  after 2  years. The last row contains the grand total which is what the RD will yield at the end of the time period.