Difference between IRR and ROR
There may be differences in different contexts, but here's my general understanding: Rate of Return (or Return on Investment) is the total gain or loss of an investment divided by the initial investment amount.  e.g. if you buy stock for $100 and later sell it for $120 you have a 20% Rate of Return.  You would have a 20% ROR regardless of if you sell it tomorrow or in a year. Internal Rate of Return is effectively annualized.  It is the annual rate at which each of a series of cashflows is discounted that would give you a net present value of 0.  Meaning if you spent $100 today and in exactly one year you received $120 back, you would have an IRR of 20%.  If you received the $120 back in 6 months, your IRR would be roughly 40%. An IRR calculation can include multiple cashflows at various times, while ROR is (in my mind) the total net gain or loss relative to the investment (irrespective of the time of the cash flows). IRR is more effective when comparing investments that have different time horizons.  Spending $100 to get $120 tomorrow is much better (from an IRR perspective) than getting $120 two years from now, since you could take that $20 gain and invest it for the rest of the two years.
NRE is better. It's a tax free account, exempt from income tax. NRE account is freely repatriable (Principal and interest earned) while the NRO account has restricted repatriability Probably because it's a question of Excel vs Access, not VBA vs SQL. You probably don't need VBA for any of the calcs that the OP mentions.  Excel is the one tool everyone uses in Finance. CR and SSRS require tools and permissions that the average guy simply won't have, and a level of expertise that is not useful for most front/middle-office analysis work.  I usually see these done in Excel. SSRS and CR seem like way overkill for something done trivially and transparently in Excel, whose presentation will change frequently anyway.  Depending on what OP is talking about, analysis is not reporting, and flexibility and transparency usually win. Especially when you want to poke around the underlying data and iterate with other people.  SSRS and CR only make sense when you know what you're looking for, that the data is appropriate for it and you don't expect it to change. The difference is that for the one year time frame the data is represented based on daily data and the SMA is 20 days, whilst for the 5 year timeframe the data is automatically represented as weekly data with the SMA represented by 20 weeks not 20 days anymore. This happens due to daily data on this chart being too much data to represent over a 5 year period so the data defaults to weekly data over such a long period. If the chart is represented as weekly data then any indicators will also have to be represented in weekly data. If you use a more sophisticated charting program you can actually select to see daily or weekly data over longer periods such as 5 years or more. "Given your clarifying comment that you're asking about the length of stay rather than AirBnB in particular, I'd say there is a decent chance there will be tax differences.  The difference is unlikely to be in income tax, but many cities have local ordinances that impose transaction taxes on short stays.  For instance, the town where I live has a ""transient occupancy tax"" for any paid stay of less than 31 days. Unfortunately, because these taxes are often levied by individual cities, it's hard to know whether one applies in your case.  One town may impose no tax while the town right next to it does impose a tax.  You'll have to look at what your local laws are.  This could be easy if your town has a nice comprehensive website about local laws; if not you may have to do some deeper research. In any case, you should definitely look into it, since there could be penalities if there is a tax and the city finds out you're not paying it.  As AirBnB has grown in popularity, many municipalities have begun to crack down on AirBnB renters who try to make money without paying taxes like a regular motel (as well as conforming to other laws, e.g., running a business in a neighborhood zoned residential)." "A couple of distinctions. First, if you were to ""invest in real estate"" were you planning to buy a home to live in, or buy a home to rent out to someone else?  Buying a home as a primary residence really isn't ""investing in real estate"" per se.  It's buying a place to live rather than renting one.  Unless you rent a room out or get a multi-family unit, your primary residence won't be income-producing.  It will be income-draining, for the most part.  I speak as a homeowner. Second, if you are buying to rent out to someone else, buying a single home is quite a bit different than buying an REIT.  The home is a lot less liquid, the transaction costs are higher, and all of your eggs are in one basket.  Having said that, though, if you buy one right and do your homework it can set you on the road for a very comfortable retirement." "Investopedia probably should change the wording to ""tax free"" since all of the gains in a Roth IRA can be withdrawn without any additional taxes at retirement time. Tax deferred should only refer to the gains in a traditional IRA. ""Tax advantaged"" might be a reasonable term to use in both cases." "I'm a mathematician, not an accountant.  But my feeling has been that the distinction between Asset and Liability is mainly a sign convention, and comes from a wish to avoid negative numbers. Suppose you take out a loan for $1000 and deposit the proceeds in your bank account.  Under normal accounting conventions, your bank account is an Asset and the loan is a Liability.  After the loan, Bank has a balance of 1000 and Loan has a balance of 1000.  You can compute your net worth by adding all Assets and subtracting all Liabilities (so in this case your net worth remains 0). If you treat Loan as an Asset account, then after taking out the loan, you should give it a balance of -1000.  Under this convention, you have lots of negative numbers to deal with everywhere, which I suspect early accountants would have found inconvenient.  The Asset/Liability convention means you only need to deal with negative numbers in unusual situations (overdrawn bank account, overpaid loan, etc). Likewise, in theory you could treat Expense accounts as negative Income. But I'm not sure why you feel the need to reinvent the wheel by ""simplifying"" double-entry accounting like this.  The standard conventions are not that complicated, and their major advantage is that they're standard: other people will be able to understand your books if they ever need to.  (Say you want to hire somebody to do your taxes at some point: if your books are kept in your own idiosyncratic system, their job will be at best error-prone and at worst impossible.)   It's a bit like a proposal to simplify English spelling: shur, a sistum waar yu rit lik this mit bee simplur in sum abstrakt sens, but if nobudee els can reed it eezulee, it izunt ackshyualee veree yusful." "A bit strange but okay.  The way I would think about this is again that you need to determine for what purpose you're computing this, in much the same way you would if you were to build out the model. The IPO valuation is not going to be relevant to the accretion/dilution analysis unless you're trying to determine whether the transaction was net accretive at exit. But that's a weird analysis to do. For longer holding periods like that you're more likely to look at IRR, not EPS. EPS is something investors look at over the short to medium term to get a sense of whether the company is making good acquisition decisions. And to do that short-to-medium term analysis, they look at earnings.   Damodaran would say this is a shitty way of looking at things and that you should probably be looking at some measure of ROIC instead, and I tend to agree, but I don't get paid to think like an investor, I get paid to sell shit to them (if only in indirect fashion). The short answer to your question is that no, you should not incorporate what you are calling liquidation value when determining accretion/dilution, but only because the market typically computes accretion/dilution on a 3-year basis tops. I've never put together a book or seen a press release in my admittedly short time in finance that says ""the transaction is estimated to be X% accretive within 4 years"" - that just seems like an absurd timeline.  Final point is just that from an accounting perspective, a gain on a sale of an asset is not going to get booked in either EBITDA or OCF, so just mechanically there's no way for the IPO value to flow into your accretion/dilution analysis there, even if you are looking at EBITDA/shares. You could figure the gain on sale into some kind of adjusted EBITDA/shares version of EPS, but this is neither something I've ever seen nor something that really makes sense in the context of using EPS as a standardized metric across the market. Typically we take OUT non-recurring shit in EPS, we don't add it in. Adding something like this in would be much more appropriate to measuring the success of an acquisition/investing vehicle like a private equity fund, not a standalone operating company that reports operational earnings in addition to cash flow from investing. And as I suggest above, that's an analysis for which the IRR metric is more ideally situated.  And just a semantic thing - we typically wouldn't call the exit value a ""liquidation value"". That term is usually reserved for dissolution of a corporate entity and selling off its physical or intangible assets in piecemeal fashion (i.e. not accounting for operational synergies across the business). IPO value is actually just going to be a measure of market value of equity." As you have income from Business / Profession, you would need to use form ITR4S Should you care? From Vanguard: The long-term impact of investment costs on portfolio balances   Assuming a starting balance of $100,000 and a yearly return of 6%, which is reinvested Check out this chart, reflecting the impact of relatively small expense ratios on your 30 year return:  All else being equal you should very much care about expense ratios. You end up with a significantly smaller amount if your pre-expense return is the same. A 0.75% difference in ER compounds to 20% over 30 years. If so, how should I take them into consideration when comparing funds? I'm in the U.S. if that matters. If they track the same index, cheaper is better. The cases where higher expense ratios might be better are if you believe that index will outperform the market by enough to recoup the cost of the ER.  There is significant research that most funds do not do this. There are at least a couple of ways you could view this to my mind: Make an Excel spreadsheet and use the IRR function to compute the rate of return you are having based on money being added. Re-invested distributions in a mutual fund aren't really an additional investment as the Net Asset Value of the fund will drop by the amount of the distribution aside from market fluctuation. This is presuming you want a raw percentage that could be tricky to compare to other funds without doing more than a bit of work in a way. Look at what is the fund's returns compared to both the category and the index it is tracking. The tracking error is likely worth noting as some index funds could lag the index by a sizable margin and thus may not be that great. At the same time there may exist cases where an index fund isn't quite measuring up that well. The Small-Growth Indexing Anomaly would be the William Bernstein article from 2001 that has some facts and figures for this that may be useful. Aah... well, then in that case you should actually integrate a monte carlo return scenario with your equity values.  Ultimately it's not going to matter what your RFR is because it's going to be equal in both cases, so you're really just talking about return differences.  Again, it would be impractical for these two options.  Maybe just look at cash outlay - an amortization table of sorts, and that's how you'd calculate the breakeven point.  You could inflate the unspent cash difference by a small margin (perhaps 0.5% to account for something like a CD or an ARS) but the big difference is going to be the interest rate with respect to a mortgage vs. a perpetual cash payment of rent that never attains any real value. Perfect, really needed an ELI5 scenario.  So correct me if I'm wrong, what this means is having an NPV of zero of an investment shows that you will be definitely breaking even - and that's better than just having your money lying around doing nothing.  Now let's take a PE example. Why is it that they prefer having an IRR of 20% or more. Why not less?   Is it because 20% takes care of the cost of capital and more? I.e. if your IRR is greater than your cost of capital, it means that all the outflows from the cost of capital still result in an NPV of zero.  But if your IRR is less than your cost of capital, that means you'll make a loss. Correct?  Thanks for your time on this. Using the default values for age and retirement and only making the changes you specified in the question. assumed ROR: 6%, current tax rate: 25%, retirement tax rate: 15%,   married, have an employer retirement plan. The results from the two calculators are: Traditional IRA: 631,341 IRA before taxes 536,640 IRA after taxes. Roth IRA: 631,341 Roth IRA 450,207 Taxable Savings where: Total taxable savings       The total amount you would have accumulated by retirement in a taxable savings account. your question: The (Traditional) IRA After Taxes value is 6.3% higher than the (Roth)   Taxable Savings amount. (Both had an equal gross amount.) Does that mean I should put my money in a tIRA instead of a Roth? My percentages don't match your percentages because you didn't specify the numbers you used. In any case the 450K number shows you what you would have if the money was not invested in an IRA or 401K. To decide between a Roth and a traditional IRA ignore the taxable savings number, that only shows what  happens if you decide not not use a retirement account. Both are correct depending on what you are really trying to evaluate. If you only want to understand how that particular investment you were taking money in and out of did by itself than you would ignore the cash.  You might use this if you were thinking of replacing that particular investment with another but keeping the in/out strategy. If you want to understand how the whole investment strategy worked (both the in/out motion and the choice of investment) than you would definitely want to include the cash component as that is necessary for the strategy and would be your final return if you implemented that strategy. As a side note, neither IRR or CAGR are not great ways to judge investment strategies as they have some odd timing issues and they don't take into account risk.