Power of compounding in the stock market: What compounding can teach us in our everyday lives

The word itself says for itself. You must have gone through this phase when you come across articles or news related to the stock market. Compounding is not only about money, compounding happens to our day-to-day lives also. In fact, whatever you see around you, it's the result of an act that happened over time. Still, confused?

Let me give you a few examples to get through this.

Everyday scenarios of compounding

Everyone has lunch over their houses, right? You or your mom prepare those delicious foods which probably takes hours. A simple act as cutting and chopping the vegetables, and start preparing adds up to compounding. These small and simple tasks when compounded over time bring in the food. In the beginning, if you see, there isn’t much happening, there are some vegetables here and there and some spices lying around. But as time goes by, these dishes start to take their shape and finally, you have the prepared lunch to be served in your home.

When you have a small pain in your joints, at first you ignore them. But over time, the pain starts to increase and this can lead to other complications. The small neglected pain over time compounds to a larger pain. The sum you have to pay in the initiative would have been in nothing, just to take care of your joints. But since you neglected it, now you would have to pay a huge sum for treatment to correct this problem.

Everyone loves riding their car. When I was driving, I could hear small sounds in the shock absorbers. I probably thought it was some tiny problem and ignored it for few days. But over time, the sound got increased, and eventually, I had to go to the repair shop. The mechanic told me if I had brought it earlier the problem would have been just to fix the bushes which would have cost me 200 rupees.

Now, the shock absorber is also affected and I have to replace the whole shock absorber assembly which will cost me 5000 rupees. Had I been a bit conscious, this small problem wouldn’t have compounded over time.

Now you can see, everything is related to compounding, and now you can get a good view of how important is compounding to our day-to-day activities.

Interest

Interest is something you get for the capital you have paid to the bank. If you have deposited your money in your bank, your bank will pay you interest on your money. This applies if your money is parked in some Fixed deposit or savings account.

Suppose you have taken a loan from the bank, the bank charges you interest for the loan taken. If they are charging 10% and you have taken 1,00,000 (1 Lakh) as a loan, you would have to pay 10,000 per year as interest alone upon paying your capital. If you see, capital is something you have to pay to the bank by default, this interest is the money you are paying to the bank for their service of lending this huge amount. This interest is normally calculated annually and different banks have their own interest rates.

These interest rates are the one which attracts people into buying different properties. If the interest rate is less, people will take loans and start buying more. If the rate is high, they will be reluctant to take a loan, thus wouldn’t go for buying anything.

From the above words, interest can be applied when you give money and make money. Give money to the bank in terms of savings account and take money from the bank in terms of the loan. For the sake of this article, let's concentrate on interest when you park your money in the bank or start something like a deposit in the bank.

Simple Interest

As the words convey, simple interest is simple to calculate. Here, the interest keeps on adding from the base capital only, which is your initial capital.

Suppose you have deposited 50,000 in the bank for 10 years at 10% simple interest. Here, after each year, 10% of your base capital will be added to your account.

Let me show you from the below table:

Year	Interest	Interest Amount	Final Capital
After 1st year	10%	5000	55,000
After 2nd year	10%	5000	60,000
After 3rd year