Have you ever struggled to figure out the real price you’ll have to pay for a good or product that is on sale for 20 or 30% off? “Percent” literally means out of a hundred, so it’s as if someone cut the item into 100 equal pieces when you take a percentage off. Then, a certain number of pieces is removed depending on the percent off.
With a percent off calculator, it’s very easy to calculate this. But it’s not impossible even if you don’t have one. No actual removing or cutting is needed – all you need are a few simple procedures to figure out a percentage discount.
Calculating Percent Off
A person would need to know the percent of the discount being applied and the original price of the item in order to check how much they’re saving on a sale good or product. First, the percentage needs to be converted to a decimal. This is done by dividing the percentage discount by one hundred. If a pair of boots is on sale at 30% off, you have 30 ÷ 100 = 0.3.
The next step is multiplying the discount by the original price. The result will be the amount of money you save in the sale or the discount in dollars. If the boots originally cost $100, you have:
$100 × 0.3 = $30
So if the boots originally cost $100 and they are on sale for 30 percent off, the buyer saves $30. It logically follows that you’ll pay $70, but it may be necessary to show that the [original price] – [discount in dollars] is equivalent to the price you’ll be paying if you’re calculating percentages for a math problem. In other words, $100 – $30 = $70 is the new price of the boots on sale.
Sale Price: Cutting to the Chase
To figure out what information you need, you might have to pay specific attention to real-world problems and math problems. If the good or product’s sale price after the discount is applied is what you really need to know, you can proceed directly to calculating what’s left after the discount is applied, omitting the interim step of calculating the discount amount in dollars.
There is a T-shirt that cost $80, now on sale for 20 percent off. To calculate the amount remaining after deducting the discount, subtract the discount percentage from 100. The sum that remains will represent what is left of the original price minus the applicable discount. With the expensive T-shirt example, we have the following equation:100 – 20 = 80 percent. You’ll be paying 80 percent of the original price after you deduct the 20 percent discount.
Conversion to a Decimal
To convert the new sale price to a decimal, divide the percentage – 80 percent in our T-shirt example – by 100 to convert it to a decimal: 80 ÷ 100 = 0.8. Finally, you get the sale price of the T-shirt by multiplying the original price by the discount percentage.
Some people feel this is all too much to bother with and prefer to use tools like apps or calculators to reduce the time it takes to figure out the percentage off a product. There are a lot of such tools available online, such as free calculators. The free calculator you use calculates the percent off immediately, so you know how much you’ll be spending on something in advance and if you feel the price is reasonable, you can then proceed to try on the product (if it’s clothes or shoes, for example). If not, no need to trouble yourself with changing!
About The Author
Nicole Hinton
Nicole is a freelancer & passionate blogger. She has 4+ years of experience in digital marketing and specialize in content writing, content marketing and organic search engine optimization. She has worked with many brands from Canada as well as the USA. Currently, she manages content marketing team of freelancers and doing their business efficiently.
