Work out the monthly payment before you sign

No. There is no server to upload to — the site is static files, and the arithmetic runs in your own browser. This page also saves nothing to your device: close the tab and the figures are gone. That is deliberate for a calculator that holds what you earn and what you owe.

The standard annuity formula for a reducing-balance loan: the payment is fixed, interest is charged each month on the balance that is left, and whatever the payment covers beyond that interest reduces the principal. It is what banks call a term loan or reducing-balance loan, and it is what almost every personal, car and home loan uses.

Lenders differ on rounding and on how they treat the first partial month between disbursement and the first instalment. This calculator works in whole cents and puts the difference on the final payment, so the schedule closes at exactly zero. Expect a match to the cent on the monthly figure and a small difference on the last row.

Not on this page, and the difference matters enough that it has its own. Car loans in Malaysia are hire purchase, quoted at a flat rate: interest is charged on the original amount for the whole term rather than on the falling balance, so a flat 2.9% works out at roughly 5.4% in the terms this page uses. Use the car loan calculator for those — it takes the flat rate directly and converts it for you. If a personal loan is quoted flat rate, the same applies.

They are not included, because they vary by lender and by product and are often negotiable or waived. What this gives you is the cost of the borrowing itself. If you are buying a home in Malaysia, the mortgage calculator adds the statutory stamp duties on top.

It depends on what the extra years cost, and this page puts that number next to the instalment so you can see it rather than guess. As a shape: stretching a loan from five years to seven usually cuts the monthly payment by around a fifth and raises the total interest by around a half. A longer term is the right answer when the shorter one would leave you with no margin — a missed instalment is far more expensive than the extra interest — and the wrong answer when it is being used to afford a larger loan than you would otherwise take.

Because interest is charged on what you still owe, and at the start you still owe everything. On a 30-year loan at 4%, the first instalment is roughly two-thirds interest, and the crossover where more of the payment goes to principal than to interest does not arrive until around year twelve. Nothing is wrong when your statement shows this — it is the arithmetic of a reducing balance, and it is exactly why an extra payment made in year two is worth far more than the same amount paid in year twenty.

More than people expect, because every ringgit paid against the principal cancels all the interest that ringgit would have generated for the rest of the term. Enter a figure in the extra payment field and the result shows both effects: the months removed from the end of the loan and the interest never charged. The general rule is that the earlier the extra payment, the larger the effect, so a lump sum in the first two years is worth substantially more than the same sum spread evenly across the whole term.

The rate on this page is a nominal annual rate divided into twelve monthly charges, which is how term loans are quoted and how the schedule is built. Because interest is applied monthly rather than once a year, the effective annual rate is slightly higher than the number quoted — 6% nominal works out at about 6.17% effective. Lenders in some markets are required to quote an APR that also folds in fees; this page does not, because it deliberately excludes fees, so compare it against a fee-free quoted rate rather than against an APR.

The total interest figure, added to the amount you borrowed. That is the number worth carrying into a negotiation, because a difference of half a percentage point that looks trivial on a monthly instalment can be several thousand ringgit over the term — and it is the figure a lender is least likely to lead with. Change the rate by 0.5 and watch the total rather than the instalment to see what a rate is worth.

For a straightforward term loan, yes — the arithmetic is the same regardless of who is borrowing. It does not model the things that make business facilities different: an interest-only period at the start, a drawdown in stages rather than a single disbursement, a variable rate that moves with a base rate, or a balloon payment at the end. For any of those, treat the answer as the fixed-rate, fully-amortising case and expect the real schedule to differ.

Only loosely. Cards charge daily and the minimum payment moves as the balance falls, so a fixed-instalment model is optimistic. Enter the balance, the annual rate and a fixed amount you commit to paying each month, and treat the answer as the best case.