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What benefit do you get if you make a one-time prepayment to your home loan?

Posted on 04 Oct 2023
Author: Sayan Sircar

Tags: Loans ; House Purchase

11 mins read
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This article shows you the benefits due to interest saving when you make a part-payment to your home loan. Your loan duration also reduces due to the pre-payment.

What benefit do you get if you make a one-time prepayment to your home loan?

This article is a part of our detailed article series on the concept of home loans. Ensure you have read the other parts here:

How much time and interest do you save if you pay off your home loan using a step-up EMI?

This article shows how quickly you can pay off your home loan, and even save a lot of interest, by increasing your EMI steadily year-on-year.

Home loan tax benefits that you get when you buy a property jointly with your spouse

This article tells you why it is a good idea to buy a home jointly as a couple and it is not only the tax benefits you get.

Home Loan Eligibility for Joint Applicants: how to buy a bigger house

This article shows you an easy way to calculate how big a house you can buy based on your family’s combined monthly salary.

Home Loan Rate Hiked? How Much Prepayment should you make to Keep EMI and Tenor Same?

Home loan rate hike? You can prepay to keep EMI and tenor same. This post shows how.

How paying a small fee to your bank can save you lakhs in home-loan interest?

This article shows how paying a small fee to your bank to reduce your home loan rate can save you lakhs in interest over the life of your loan.

How much EMI do I have to pay for my home loan?

This article shows a handy ready reckoner for home loan EMI amounts for all tenures and interest rates along with the amount of principal and interest to be paid.

Should you prepay your home loan at the beginning or at the end of the tenure?

This article helps you decide when to prepay your home loan - at the beginning, middle or end of the total loan period.

How does an overdraft loan like SBI Maxgain work?

This articles describes overdraft home loans like SBI Maxgain and BOB Home Loan Advantage.

What should you do when your home loan interest rates go up?

This post discusses managing when interest rates go up increasing your home loan EMI.

📚 Topics covered:

How a home loan works?
One worked out example
How to use the tables of data?
Pre-payment savings at 8.50% interest rate
- Time saved when prepayment is done at 8.50% interest rate
- Interest saved when prepayment is done at 8.50% interest rate
Pre-payment savings at 9.00% interest rate
- Time saved when prepayment is done at 9.00% interest rate
- Interest saved when prepayment is done at 9.00% interest rate
Pre-payment savings at 9.50% interest rate
- Time saved when prepayment is done at 9.50% interest rate
- Interest saved when prepayment is done at 9.50% interest rate
Pre-payment savings at 10.00% interest rate
- Time saved when prepayment is done at 10.00% interest rate
- Interest saved when prepayment is done at 10.00% interest rate
What to do if your home loan interest rate is very high?

How a home loan works?

Mortgage payment vs home equity

The bank gives a home loan to own the property while you use it until you pay back the loan via EMIs. An Equated Monthly Instalment plan (EMI) is a standard way to pay off a loan by making a fixed payment monthly that has both interest and principal in the same amount.

EMI = Principal + Interest

In each EMI, the split of the interest and principal changes since the interest is based on the outstanding loan balance at that point and the rest of the EMI is principal. As the chart shows, the interest part drops off with time, and the rest is the principal. The actual numbers in the chart relate to a ₹50 lakhs home loan taken at 8% for 25 years. The EMI is ₹38,591. The down payment amount is ₹12.5 lakhs.

You can test the numbers using this calculator:

As you pay back the loan, your ownership share in the house will increase in the same way. At the point of taking the loan, you own 20% of the house (12.5 out of 62.5 of which 50 is the loan). The bank owns 80%. As the loan is repaid, you own more and more of the house as the principal is paid off. This is the concept of building equity in an asset. Equity is the part of the asset you own after subtracting the part that the bank owns.

Home equity value = Current home value - Outstanding loan balance

Once you build equity in your home, that has additional benefits:

you can take a top-up loan in case you need money for some other purpose like home improvement, or any other reason
the more you will get to keep if you sell the house

We break down the home loan rate into its major components to see where the fluctuations come from.

Repo linked Home loan rate = Repo Rate + Spread + Premium

Repo rate: This rate is decided by RBI. Home loan rates will move up and down as soon as RBI revises the Repo rate

The latest repo rate is 6.5%. This rate was last reviewed by RBI on 08 Feb 2024.

Spread: This is an additional rate on top of the repo rate that essentially captures the profit the bank can make off this loan relative to the deposits it offers to customers. This rate is generally revised every three years but will vary from bank to bank.

Premium: an extra value for some specific customers. E.g SBI adds another 15bps for non-salaried customers or will depend on the CIBIL score of the borrower. This value is also revised periodically like every three years.

We will now look at the effect of a single prepayment. The logic here is that the prepayment immediately impacts the principal and effectively makes the loan smaller.

Warning: Depending on how the bank (or NBFC) treats home loans, the prepaid amount may not hit the principal immediately. Also some lenders reduce the EMI and others reduce the loan tenure. It is up to you to check with the lender that the principal is reduced immediately and the duration is reduced. Reduction of duration saves the interest you need to pay over time.

Should you prepay your home loan? We have discussed this in detail here: Should you use your stock market profits to prepay a home loan?.

One worked out example

We will now use a sample home loan to see what happens when you prepay. If you are using Excel to calculate your home loan EMI, the formula to use is:

EMI = PMT(rate/12,time * 12,-principal,0,0)) where time = years left to pay the loan

Interest paid = EMI * Number_of_EMIs - Principal left

Metric	Value
Loan balance (₹ lakhs)	50
Rate of interest	10.00%
Years left	15
EMI	₹53,730
Total interest to be paid	₹46,71,446
Prepayment %	30%
Prepayment amount (lakhs)	₹15
New loan period (months)	94
Interest saved	₹15,67,630
Time savings	48%
Interest savings	66%

We will now look at various savings values for interest and time if you make a one time prepayment.

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How to use the tables of data?

Step 1: Choose the section closest to your home loan interest rate: we have multiple options below
Step 2: Choose the column which has the actual number of years left in the loan
Step 3: Now look for the reduction percentage for both interest and time for various percentages of prepayment

Pre-payment savings at 8.50% interest rate

Time saved when prepayment is done at 8.50% interest rate

Interest saved when prepayment is done at 8.50% interest rate

Pre-payment savings at 9.00% interest rate

Time saved when prepayment is done at 9.00% interest rate

Interest saved when prepayment is done at 9.00% interest rate

Pre-payment savings at 9.50% interest rate

Time saved when prepayment is done at 9.50% interest rate

Interest saved when prepayment is done at 9.50% interest rate

Pre-payment savings at 10.00% interest rate

Time saved when prepayment is done at 10.00% interest rate

Interest saved when prepayment is done at 10.00% interest rate

What to do if your home loan interest rate is very high?

You should approach your lender to reduce it. This article shows the benefits of reduction: How paying a small fee to your bank can save you lakhs in home-loan interest?.

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