Greg Low describes persisted computed columns:
Each time the value from that column is queried, the calculation is performed so the result can be returned. This makes sense when the value is changing regularly and the value is queried infrequently.
However, according to my completely subjective statistics, most computed columns are queried much more than they are ever changed. So why work the value out each and every time?
One really nice thing about persisted computed columns is that you can then build non-clustered indexes using these columns. It’s a great way of pre-computing work that you need to do often but which would violate rules of database normalization.