amortization schedule

Amortization Schedules

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An amortization schedule is a document that is a huge spreadsheet of numbers that tells banks and their software how to apply your monthly mortgage payment. It defines the amount of each payment going to principal to pay off the loan balance, and the amount going to interest for the bank allowing you to borrow their money.

Let’s rewind. How does the bank figure out how much your monthly principal and interest payment is going to be? This is a function of several things:

  • Loan amount (purchase price minus down payment)
  • Interest rate
  • Loan term (length)

Want to see a formula for that?

  • loan amount = x
  • interest rate = y
  • loan term (months) = z

Looks like a blast doesn’t it? I saved this formula into my spreadsheet for evaluating properties so that once I fill in the purchase price, expected down payment, loan length, and the predicted rate from my lender, it will auto-populate the monthly mortgage payment amount. I then take that number and can calculate predicted cash flow based on a rent estimate.

Back to the point of the post. Loans with long terms borrow the money for a long time. Loans with high rates borrow the money more expensively. In both cases, the early stages of the amortization schedule give much more money to the bank as your fee for borrowing (interest) than they do to pay down the loan. This is because every dollar of that loan principal is being borrowed and needs paid for.

In the first payment, the entire principal amount borrowed is in that formula above, so it’s expensive to the bank to give you that money. Fast forward 15 years of a 30 year loan and you have far less outstanding principal left, so the interest charge associated with that is less. Since your total monthly mortgage payment (principal and interest, ignoring escrows) total doesn’t change, the interest applied towards a smaller balance leaves more ‘room’ to pay toward more principal. Basically, the bank gets its money out of your monthly payment first, and what is left over can go to principal pay-down.

DAILY INTEREST

To better explain the cost of borrowing each dollar over time, it’s likely easier to break it down into daily interest. An amortization schedule calculates the cost to the borrower for giving you the bank’s money on a per day basis. So while I have access to $X for the whole month, I owe the bank for every day I’m carrying that principal. Multiply by 30 and that’s what the bank charges me for interest for the month. Then, remember that the leftover is what goes to the principal pay-down.

How to calculate. Divide your annual interest rate by 365 to get your daily interest rate. Multiply that rate by the outstanding principal to get your daily interest charge. Multiply that by the days in the month (or most banks use a standard month length = 365/12) and come up with the interest the amortization schedule charges you for that month’s payment.

We mentioned the different types of amortization we’ve seen in the House 1 post. This loan calculated your monthly principal part of the payment by the exact number of days in the month so each month’s proportion of principal to interest varied up and down. This is in contrast to what most banks do that I mention above.

THEORETICAL EXAMPLES

A pretty standard rate in the last decade is 4% on a 30 year fixed mortgage. Lets say the loan amount is $100k. Plugging that into my formula above, we get a monthly payment of $477.42. Above are the first 10 payments on that loan. Only about 30% of your monthly payment is actually paying down principal at the beginning. It takes 153 payments (i.e., months) before the amount of each payment going to principal is actually more than paying interest. Total interest on the full loan in this scenario is $71,869.

Now lets look what happens when we change it to a 15 year loan. The total payment jumps to $739.69 because you are paying the principal down twice as fast. But, the first payment you make is already $406.35 worth of principal pay down. Compare it to the first loan example in the terms of daily interest. The rate is the same. The amount is the same. So the interest due for the month is the same. But because your amortization schedule knows that you’re paying the loan off much earlier and requires a larger total payment, the leftover for principal pay-down is far more substantial.

Next, look how much quicker the interest charge drops after just 10 payments compared to the first example. $320.98 vs $328.95. This is because you are paying principal down more quickly, so the outstanding balance decreases and the daily interest is then lower too. Total interest in this scenario is $33,143.

In this example, we move back to a 30 year loan, still at $100,000, but we bumped the rate to 6%. The total payment rises to nearly $600, and the principal to interest ratio of the beginning payments is quite poor. Only 17% of the payment is going to principal pay down, which means that the daily interest is high, and stays high for many months. It’s not until month 223 (18 years later!) before the amount of principal in each payment is higher than the interest payment. Total interest in this scenario is $115,838.

Side story – Mr. ODA’s parents paid off their 30 year mortgage on their residence in 12 years. As a child, Dad would explain to me their process. They printed out the amortization schedule and put it on the fridge. Each month, based on their regular cash flow of life, they would choose ‘how many months’ they wanted to pay to the loan. So they’d make their regular payment, then they’d pay the principal portion of the next 2-3 months on the amortization schedule also. They’d make some really gnarly extra payments with weird dollars and cents, but it was a calculated decision. Then they’d cross those months off the schedule, knowing that with that extra payment, the interest that was tied to that principal portion on the schedule was simply avoided/canceled, by paying that principal early. This was a powerful tool to help me understand how the loan process worked, and one that help create the foundation for me to look at time value of money, opportunity cost, guaranteed return vs potential invested return, etc. Dad missed a lot of stock market gains by accelerating a 30 year mortgage to 12 years, but very few people ever regret owning the roof over their head free and clear – with a byproduct of NO MORTGAGE PAYMENTS for the 18 years that would’ve been remaining! Now he can make more investments with that leftover cash flow of life.

Amortization schedules are one of the largest “gaps” in understanding for the typical mortgage customer. They typically get told what to pay each month and ascribe to a “set it and forget” mantra that they know in 30 years, their house will be owned free and clear. Anytime before that, why bother understanding the background math?

As you can see in the examples, a shorter loan means faster pay down with less interest overall, and a lower interest rate means a smaller payment. When looking at loan options, understanding how the math operates to get to your options can help you determine what your priorities and goals are, and how to execute them.

In our recent refinancing post we talked about analyzing when was a good time to refinance our existing loans and which ones we’d target first. Simple advice you can find on the internet is that it’s a good idea to refinance if you plan to keep the property for longer than the result of closing costs divided by monthly payment. Most times this was about 2 years for us. You can see above that the 6% example had a $123 larger monthly payment than the 4% example (30 year term). So if closing costs are $2,000, it would only take 16 months (2000/123=16) to “break even” on a refi to go from a 6% loan to a 4% loan. No brainer!

There’s another hidden benefit there too, that gets missed to make it even shorter than 16 months. Look at the principal portion of the monthly payment. On the 6% example, it’s only $99 on payment 1, but on the 4% example it’s $144. That’s another $45 benefit! You’re paying down the principal at a faster rate. Add that extra principal portion embedded within the monthly payment to the $123 lower payment savings ($123+45=$168) and you get a “break even” point of only 12 months ($2000 closing costs/$168=11.9)!

Understand how your mortgage math works so that you can speak intelligently to a lender, ask good questions, and set yourself up with the best scenario for your finances and your future.

Mortgage Evaluations

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Rate Sheet Options from your Lender

When reaching out to a loan officer, there are a lot of options to choose from. I’m hoping to break down the decision-making here. I’ll share how we ended up with several different options, too.

Basically, it boils down to: 

  • Put enough down to avoid paying Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI)
  • Don’t pay more than 20% unless there’s a decent incentive. 
  • Don’t pick a loan term shorter than 30 years unless there’s a decent incentive. 
  • Carefully evaluate any Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs).

PMI

I broke down PMI in a previous post: PMI – Private Mortgage Insurance. We suggest doing whatever you can to meet the requirements to avoid paying this. The cost of PMI can be a couple hundred dollars per month, which is money that can be put towards the principal balance of your loan or other bills, rather than in the bank’s pockets. There are also hoops to jump through to remove PMI early, which may include paying for another appraisal on the house ($400-$700!).

LOAN TERMS

A conventional loan will likely require 20% to avoid paying PMI. There are some loan options out there that may allow a smaller down payment without a ‘penalty’ (e.g., PMI, higher interest rate), but 20% is the standard, and is usually required when purchasing an investment property.

There may be an option to put down more than 20% or you may think you can afford to pay a higher mortgage each month, so you’re interested in a shorter loan term. Unless there’s an incentive (e.g., lower interest rate, better closing costs), stick with the bare minimum to get the loan.

If there is an incentive, you’ll need analyze the math and your goals to determine if committing extra money to a higher down payment or a larger monthly payment is worth it. If you have extra cash each month, you can pay more towards your principal rather than pigeon holing yourself into a higher monthly payment. Plus, if you have more cash liquid, you may be able to purchase another rental property, which will increase your monthly cash flow.

While we evaluate the loan terms on every house purchase, I’ll share the details of the two most “unconventional” options we chose. Two things to note: 1) lenders add a ‘surcharge’ to the rate for it being an investment property, typically around 0.75%, which means the rates aren’t going to be the great, super-low, rates being advertised; and 2) the term “point” means a fee of 1% of the loan amount.

HOUSE #2

For House #2 (purchased in 2016), we were informed that if we put 20% down instead of 25%, the rate would increase 0.25% on average. If we assume a 30 year conventional loan, 20% down at 4.125% equates to about $69,700 paid in interest (assuming no additional principal payments); 25% down at 3.875% equates to about $60,800 paid in interest. By putting an additional $5,850 as part of our down payment, we saved about $9,000 in interest over the life of the loan.

Once we determined that we’ll put 25% down, we then had to figure out the appropriate loan length. On this particular offer, 30 year amortization wasn’t an option for us because we would have had to pay a point to get a competitive rate. We chose a 20 year amortization because the house already came with a well qualified tenant, we didn’t expect a lot of maintenance and repair costs due to the house’s age, and we didn’t have an immediate need for a higher monthly cash flow based on our place in life at the time.

While our long term goal was to have rental property cash flow replace our W2 income, this house was early in our purchasing. At the time, we were focused more on paying off House #1 (higher rate and a balloon payment after 5 years). Frankly, we didn’t truly understand the power of real estate investing at this time, and didn’t know how much it would accelerate the timeline for us to meet our goals. By decreasing our loan length, we increased our monthly payment, but also lowered the total interest paid over the loan’s life by over $22k. Since more of our monthly payment is going towards principal reduction than had it been a 30 year amortization, this loan isn’t on our priority list to pay off early.

HOUSE #3

For House #3, we evaluated the rate sheet for the loan term, interest rate, and down payment percentage again. This house was purchased a few months after House #2, so those rate decisions were fresh on our minds. We were quoted several options: 1) 20% down at 4.25% for 20 or 30 years, 2) 25% down at 3.75% for 20 or 30 years, or 3) 25% down at 3.25% with 0.5% points for 15 years.

As you can see, there’s no incentive to pick the 20-year term because it’s the same rate as a 30-year term. If we have additional cash, we can make a principal-only payments against the 30-year term rather than unnecessarily tying up our money.

At first, we thought paying points was an absolute ‘no.’ However, points aren’t a bad thing. Paying down your rate up front can save you an appreciable amount in interest. Plus, points are tax deductible.

Now for the breakdown of each options. Let’s say the house purchase was $110,000 (because it wasn’t an exact number, and it’ll just be easier to use a ‘clean’ number like this). Microsoft Excel has an amortization template where you can plug in the loan terms and see the entire amortization schedule. 

Option 1: 20% down payment equates to a loan amount of $88,000; the annual interest rate is 4.25%; the loan is for 30 years, with 12 payments per year. If we make no additional payments, this totals about $67,800 worth of interest paid over the life of the loan.

Option 2: 25% down payment equates to a loan amount of $82,500 at 3.75%. If we make no additional payments, this totals $55k worth of interest paid over the life of the loan. This requires an additional $5,500 brought to the closing table, but saves almost $13k in interest. It also decreases our monthly principal and interest payment (i.e., not including escrow) from Option 1 by $50.

Option 3: 25% down payment, 3.25% interest, and 15 years (instead of 30 years) equates to just under $22k paid in interest. To obtain the 3.25% rate, it required “half a point.” If a point is 1% of the loan amount, that would be 1% of $82,500. This rate only required 0.5%, so that meant paying $412.50 as part of closing costs along with the additional $5,500 of down payment required for 25%. However, the shorter loan length means that monthly payment is increased (between Option 2 and Option 3, the difference is $197.63).

For about $6k, we pay a higher monthly payment, but we also save a significant amount of interest over the life of the loan. The short loan term of 15 years means this one is also not on our radar to pay off while we focus on paying down other, higher interest and higher balanced, mortgages. In this case, the benefits of the big picture math outweighed the increase in monthly payment.

We are five years in on this mortgage and are already seeing significant reduction in the outstanding principal due to the amortization schedule becoming favorable more quickly. In 10 short years more, our house will be fully paid for, through rent collection, without a single dollar of extra principal payments from our other financials. What a great feeling.

ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGES (ARMs)

An adjustable rate mortgage can be beneficial depending on the terms and how long you expect to own the house. For us, we expect to hold our investment properties for a long time, so it wasn’t worth the risk of an ARM. Many times lenders won’t even offer an ARM on an investment. However, when we purchased our DC suburb home, we knew we didn’t expect to be there for more than 5 years, so we chose a 5 year ARM.

After a positive experience with that decision, we also chose an ARM on our second primary residence. We chose a 5 year ARM, even though we expected to be there longer than 5 years. We figured we would either accept the new rate, if there was one, at the end of the 5th year, or we would refinance when necessary. As a result, Mr. ODA monitored rates and refinance options over the last year or so. Unexpectedly, we sold that house 3.5 months shy of the end of the initial ARM term so we didn’t have to do anything.

I break down all the details of an ARM and our decision making in a recent post.

SUMMARY

When I reach out to my lender to ask what the rates of the day are and begin the process of locking a rate on a new loan, I ask for options. These options are in the form of a “rate sheet.” When you ‘lock’ a rate, you’re actually locking the ‘rate sheet,’ not the individual decisions of loan length and percent down. For every house, we evaluate the rate savings that can come from doing something less “conventional” than a 30-year fixed at 20% down mortgage. Our decision is based on what’s best for our goals and our cash in-hand.

As shown above, in our early decisions, we favored shorter loan terms for rate savings. but since House #3’s purchase, we noticed how much more we cared about low monthly payments and low down payments to allow us to buy more properties along the way. Every investment property loan since House #3 has been the ‘standard’ 30-year fixed at 20% down. Because of this perspective shift, we were able to buy six properties in 2017, which gives us about $2,000 in monthly cash flow that we can then use to pay down mortgages.

House #1: Off market purchase

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Our first investment purchase was a townhome in central Kentucky (while living in Virginia) in February 2016.

At this point, we had purchased and sold our first primary residence, and had purchased a new construction home. Our first home sold for $62,500 more than what we purchased it for and we walked away from the sale with over $130,000. Our new home needed about $70k for closing, leaving $60k that we wanted to use for investment properties.

PURCHASING FROM FAMILY

Mr. ODA’s brother-in-law had purchased a foreclosed townhome while he was in college and rented a room out to his friend – excellent forethought and financial decision making there! When him and his wife got married, they were ready to look into a home with more space and less stairs, so we offered to purchase the house. About 2.5 years after he had purchased it, we set him up to make $16,500.

Their Realtor suggested listing at $90-95k. The comparable sales in the area were suggesting 95-100k, but the townhouse in question had a lower PVA than the others recently sold. There was another townhome in the community listed for sale at $100k, but it had been on the market for 4 months at that time, meaning the market wasn’t interested in it at that price. Additionally, this deal was being done off market, which automatically yields a higher net for the seller because there were no Realtor commissions and minimizes the risk of a listing. They didn’t need to get it ‘show ready’ or have to leave the house for an indefinite number of showings. We removed the uncertainty of how long the house would be listed and therefore how many mortgage payments they’d still be paying before it sold. We also eliminated the possibility of an appraisal and home inspection negotiation during the contract period. For all those reasons, we offered $85,000. We settled on $87,000 with $2,000 in seller-paid-closing-costs. A family member, who’s a lawyer, sent us a template for a contract, so we used that as a starting point, and I wrote up our own contract.

We first looked into a loan assumption. We started with several questions regarding how he was paying PMI (whether we’d have to assume the PMI, whether the PMI would be recalculated for the new appraised value based on our purchase, and whether there would be a penalty if we paid down the balance faster to eliminate the PMI), how the loan balance would transfer cleanly, and whether they needed to cash out escrow. After asking all these types of questions, we learned that PNC wouldn’t allow a loan assumption of an FHA loan since our intent was to use it as an investment property.

We did not do our own home inspection. We figured the HOA would cover the exterior, and we reviewed the home inspection he had completed two years prior. There had been a few upgrades since the initial home inspection, and there wasn’t anything that needed our immediate attention. We bought a new washer and dryer since the unit didn’t have any, and I painted most of it before it was listed for rent.

THE LOAN PROCESSING

Both sides of the transaction were able to sign the purchase contract electronically. We went through the whole loan processing without having to visit Kentucky. The attorney shipped the loan documents to us, we invited a notary over to watch us sign the papers, and then we FedEx’d the papers back to the loan officer for the sellers to sign.

While the closing itself went smoothly, we had several issues with our loan provider.

Our loan was a portfolio loan, which means that it’s a loan on the primary market and not backed by Fannie/Freddie. The interest rate was 4.5%; it was amortized over 30 years, but it had a balloon payment after 10 years. We paid careful attention to this loan (e.g., made many, frequent principal payments) because that meant we’d owe over $59k in 10 years.

It was amortized by 365/360 Rule (i.e., by the day) rather than the way it works in a traditional mortgage (annual rate divided by 12). In a traditional mortgage, the principal and interest difference is based on an annual APR, which creates a consistent amortization that gradually reduces the amount of interest in each month’s payment compared to the principal that will be paid. In the 365/360 Rule, each month’s principal and interest applied to the loan is different because it’s based on the number of days in the individual month. For example, in March, we paid February’s 28 days of interest, and in April, we paid March’s 31 days of interest; therefore, more of our March payment was applied to principal.

Here’s a snapshot of the amortization schedule, reflecting the changes of interest and principal by month.

The bank’s system was antiquated in that we could not make online payments unless we had a bank account with their bank. Being that this bank was in Kentucky while we lived in Virginia, we weren’t interested in opening a bank account and funding it just to pay this loan. This meant that all of our payments had to be sent by check to their location for keyed entry. The people responsible for entering these payments were not aware of the principal-only concept, and we spent almost the entire first year of the loan having to call every single time we sent a principal payment to have them reverse it, apply it as principal-only, and credit us the days worth of interest it cost us. After several months of this occurring and the response being that the teller doesn’t know how to enter it (then teach them…), we filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. We received all the interest owed to us as a result and all future payments were applied correctly.

Due to the poor relationship with the bank and the impending balloon payment, we paid off the loan faster than the 10 years. The loan was issued February 2016, and we made our final payment in April 2020.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT

We hired a property manager since we were not local and didn’t want to manage showings or maintenance issues in an unknown market. The property management fee is 10% of the monthly income. We actually had several issues with the first property management company, but ‘managing the property manager’ is another post. We released ourselves from that first contract and negotiated with another company, who has been managing the property for the last 4 years.

We have also had to manage the HOA company to address water leaks that stemmed from the brick facade. Both times, the issue presented was eventually resolved, but never in a timely manner. Unfortunately, we are responsible for interior fixes (e.g., drywall) caused by the exterior cracks, which are covered by the HOA since it’s a townhome.

One final interesting story about this house. In November 2016, just a few months after we purchased the house, an intoxicated driver crossed the center line, hopped the curb, drove through the fence, and drove into the back of our townhome, destroying our HVAC unit and taking out a post of the 2nd story deck. It was a Sunday morning. We didn’t pay anything for this incident. The HVAC and a broken light were covered by the insurance company; the deck was repaired by the HOA’s management company. It was an incredible incident.

The townhouse hasn’t been easy to rent. We actually looked into selling it, but our property manager, who is also a Realtor, thought we could only list it at $90,000, which was not something we were interested in, having purchased it at $85k. Once the place is rented, we don’t have issues with maintenance, rent payment, or tenant-related issues. It just takes a month or two of vacancy before we find a qualified applicant. We have offered incentives for leases longer than 12 months to help eliminate our turnover rate and number of days vacant.