The time value of money is a crucial concept in finance and in financial journalism. One important application of it is in pension fund accounting, where the present value of future benefit payments promised to pension beneficiaries underpins the calculation of taxpayers’ net pension liabilities.

I explained these concepts in a workshop at the 2016 NICAR conference in Denver. To illustrate how it applies to pensions, we walked through an example of a real-life pension system – the California State Teachers’ Retirement System – and calculated the present value of its future pension obligations using data the system provided me for my training session.

It was a lot of fun. If you’d like to follow along, the raw files from the training session are available here, and my slides from the presentation are available below: