By: Ricky Lim
Getting a 30 year home loan used to be a popular choice among most home owners. The reason being the total home loan payment is being spread out across a longer time period so you can pay less each month. Plus with interest rates fixed for the 30-year period, it seems a good deal. Or is it?
The one big benefit of a 30-year home loan is that you pay lower monthly payments however, you need to take into consideration that you actually pay more in interest than someone who has a 10-year home loan. So the longer the home loan period, the more you actually pay.
To illustrate the difference the home loan period makes, here is an example. Let’s say for a 30-year home loan, the interest rate is 7%. The home loan is $100,000. That’s means your monthly payment is about $665.00. It also means the interest paid for the 30 years is around $140,000. Now suppose for a 15-year home loan with the same interest and total home loan amount. The monthly payment is around $870.00 and the total interest over 15 years is around $56,800.
So by opting for the 15-year home loan, you actually save $83,200 in total.
A longer home loan period does offers you more flexibility in that if your financial situation were to take a turn for the worse, for example, you just lost your job and jobless for the past few months. A lower monthly home loan payment helps to alleviate some of the financial problems.
So which is better? The longer or shorter home loan plan? My recommendation is if you have the financial knowledge and your financial situation is stable, it would be a good choice to take the 30-year loan and invest the savings otherwise pay towards the monthly payments. The long term payoff of your investment may match or exceeds the money you go towards repaying your home loan.
On the other hand, if you do not have the financial stability and knowledge, I would recommend for a shorter home loan. Yes, you do pay more each month but overall you will pay less for the home loan plan. Also you get to accrue equity in your home much faster which can be used to improve your credit score or FICO.
While a 30-year or even a 40-year home loan sounds attractive to most home buyers, there are some questions that needs to be answered before getting one. It is my hope that this article can help to educate home buyers some of the points that needs to be considered seriously before choosing the home loan period.
