You invest in a financial opportunity. You make an initial payment of $20,000. (Count that as a negative number).

In the next two years, you will receive payments of $12,000 and $14,000.

Assume an interest rate of 5%.

What is the net present value of this investment, at the time of your initial investment?

Recall that Excel's NPV function has this signature:

=NPV(interest_rate, payment1, payment 2, )

NPV assumes payments at the end of the period. If you make an up-front investment, you have to add that manually to the results of the NPV function to get the actual NPV value.