Let us assume that you need Rs 5 lakh for your child’s higher education today and the inflation rate will be 7 per cent. Now using MS Excel, you could calculate your future expense.w using MS Excel, you could calculate your future expense.

You need to open the worksheet and click on ‘fx’ from the status bar at the top of the sheet and choose ‘financial;’ as the category. In the list that appears, you should scroll to ‘FV’ or future value. If you click on it, it will open a dialogue box. The acronym ‘Nper’ means the number of periods, which is 15 in this case, ‘Rate’ is the inflation rate (that is 7 per cent or 0.07), ‘PMT’ can be skipped, and ‘PV’ is the current cost of highest education (5,00,000). The result will be Rs 13,79,516 that you will need after 15 years.