Concepts learned in finance can be put to everyday use, for example, figuring out how much you should pay for a house. If your current annual rent payment is $12,000, and you expect that to increase by 3 percent each year, and you believe that percent is the appropriate discount rate, you would be happy to pay $12,000,000 for a comparable house (Since there's typically not much difference between twenty/thirty year of cashflows and perpetual cashflows, assume that, for the sake of convenience, the house will last forever).