You may have observed in limited over cricket that teams with strong batting line-up choose to bowl first after winning the toss. The reason is obvious; when you are batting second you know, exactly how much, you have to score to win the match. You can calculate your required run rate and decide the batting order accordingly. In other words, if you have a clear target, decision making becomes easy. In financial planning, if you have clear quantitative goals then planning process becomes simpler and much more effective. Let us understand how this works with the help of a simple example. Suppose you are saving to make the down payment for a house. Let us assume you want to make a down-payment of Rs 20 lakhs in 3 years. If you expect to get 10% p.a. return on investment, then you can calculate how much to save every month, so that you can meet your down-payment goal. All you have to do is use a simple Microsoft Excel formula, PMT. The PMT formula has 5 arguments in the order in which