How to Calculate Opportunity Cost with Formula

Businesses can also apply the concept of opportunity costs, but they tend to call it economic costs. For business, opportunity costs exist in the production process. Your alternative is to keep using your current vehicle for the next two years, and invest money with a 3 % rate of return. There is a 22 % tax on capital gains, and the inflation rate is 1.5 %. Your interest is compounded monthly – that means your earned interest will be added to your account each month, and next month your interest will be calculated on that new, larger amount.

Another huge dilemma that affects a lot of people is choosing to start a business or advance their careers. At first, the cost of starting a new business can make you think twice about following this path. On the other hand, advancing your career can enable you to develop new skills and get ahead in life. However, you’ll easily notice that entrepreneurs tend to achieve more of what they want than those who are employed.

How to calculate the opportunity cost

Understanding the potential missed opportunities when a business or individual chooses one investment over another allows for better decision making. To understand opportunity cost in the business world, you need to know what economic profit is. Economic profit is the money that a business makes after deducting both implicit and explicit costs. The idea is that business needs to generate revenue over opportunity costs to grow and thrive.

In general, the larger the decision, the more potential fallout there is via opportunity cost. In the PPC example above, focusing on necklaces when bracelets would actually result in more revenue/profit would be a potentially fatal business error right out of the gate. Similarly, when large sums of money are involved, the potential for negative outcomes due to opportunity cost is increased. Overall, opportunity cost is simple to understand—but hard to master. Many leading businesses have gotten to the top by making intelligent business decisions based on opportunity cost while their competitors did not. This concept can be a bit complicated, but the general idea is that a business needs to earn revenue in excess of its opportunity costs for the benefits to accrue to the owners.

Economic Profit and Accounting Profit

Every time you choose something, you forgo other alternatives together with their benefits. The true cost of something is what you’ll have to give up to get. By using a PPC, business owners can intelligently plan their business models around products that will result in the highest amount of revenue or profit. The formula is not “what I sacrifice minus what I gain.” Instead, it is necessary to look at the ratio of sacrifice to gain. If we plot each point on a graph, we can see a line that shows us the number of burgers Charlie can buy depending on how many bus tickets he wants to purchase in a given week.

One formula to calculate opportunity costs could be the ratio of what you are sacrificing to what you are gaining. If we think about opportunity costs like this, then the formula is very straight forward. Consider the case of an investor who, at age 18, was encouraged by their parents to always put 100% of their disposable income into bonds. Over the next 50 years, this investor dutifully invested $5,000 per year in bonds, achieving an average annual return of 2.50% and retiring with a portfolio worth nearly $500,000. Although this result might seem impressive, it is less so when one considers the investor’s opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is used to calculate different types of company profit.

The Difference Between Opportunity Cost and Sunk Cost

Imagine you enjoyed the taco tremendously—and you make a habit of purchasing the same taco every single day. At the end of the month, your friend invites you to go out for drinks—but you can’t afford to go out because you have continuously spent money on tacos throughout the month. Not being able to purchase a smoothie was your short-term opportunity cost. Now, not being able to go out for drinks is your long-term opportunity cost. In this example, by purchasing the taco, your opportunity cost was not being able to purchase the smoothie later on. Specifically, this was the short-term opportunity cost of purchasing the taco.

The key to understanding how businesses see opportunity costs is to understand the concept of economic profit. For businesses, economic profit is the amount of money made after deducting both explicit and implicit costs. This idea is called opportunity cost, and it what is a good liquidity ratio can help people and businesses make better financial choices. Opportunity cost is a term economists use to describe the relationship between what an item adds to your life, and how much it might cost you by not having it, taking into account your other options.

What is the Opportunity Cost of a Decision?

The accounting profit would be to invest the $30 billion to receive $80 billion, hence leading to an accounting profit of $50 billion. However, the economic profit for choosing to extract will be $10 billion because the opportunity cost of not selling the land will be $40 billion. The downside of opportunity cost is it is heavily reliant on estimates and assumptions.

• Choose from 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, and 5-year ARM loan scenarios in the calculator to see examples of how different loan terms mean different monthly payments.
• You may also find it useful to go through an opportunity cost example, which provides you with a step-by-step model you can adjust to your own needs.
• Stash assumes no obligation to provide notifications of changes in any factors that could affect the information provided.
• When assessing the potential profitability of various investments, businesses look for the option that is likely to yield the greatest return.
• This theoretical calculation can then be used to compare the actual profit of the company to what the theoretical profit would have been.

A firm tries to weigh the costs and benefits of issuing debt and stock, including both monetary and nonmonetary considerations, to arrive at an optimal balance that minimizes opportunity costs. Because opportunity cost is a forward-looking consideration, the actual rate of return (RoR) for both options is unknown today, making this evaluation tricky in practice. Homeowner’s insurance is based on the home price, and is expressed as an annual premium.

Calculating opportunity cost can be difficult because not all future variables can be known in the present moment. Purchasing the taco on day one and throughout the rest of the month may have been the absolute best decision you could make. Maybe the smoothie wasn’t that good, and maybe you wouldn’t have had a good time if you had gone out for drinks with your friend. Remember that all investing carries risk, and you can lose money in the market. Stash recommends diversifying when you invest, and following the Stash Way.

It is possible to pay down your loan faster than the set term by making additional monthly payments toward your principal loan balance. The loan type you select affects your monthly mortgage payment. Explore mortgage options to fit your purchasing scenario and save money. Imagine you run a marketing agency and you have a team of five full-time employees. A client approaches you and offers to pay you a $50,000 monthly fee to handle all of their marketing needs.