John Pak, a sales manager at Manhattan Beach Toyota asked me to amortize out a 5 year loan at a certain interest rate without a calculator. I think he was just messing with me, to see if I would even try to figure it out. So I asked for scratch paper and answered it in like five minutes.
Surprisingly, my answer was right. Considering that this question was asked for a sales position as opposed to a finance position, no one else had ever gotten the correct answer…
Unfortunately, after that day, with all the number games we used on the job, I no longer knew how to do math. Now I focus my efforts on utilizing a calculator every chance I get.
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Originally posted on Quora.