A simple interest mortgage is one on which interest is calculated daily instead of monthly. On a 6% loan, for example, .06 is divided by 365 to obtain a daily rate of .016438%. This is multiplied by the balance every day to calculate the daily interest. On monthly accrual loans, in contrast, .06 is divided by 12 to obtain a monthly rate of .005, which is multiplied by the balance every month to obtain the monthly interest. For more, read What Are Simple Interest Mortgages?

Logistics of Amortization Schedules For Simple Interest Mortgages

While amortization schedules are often printed out for monthly accrual loans, I have never seen one for a simple interest loan. The logistics are just too formidable. Where an amortization schedule for a 30-year monthly accrual mortgage has 30x12 = 360 lines of numbers, the simple interest loan has 30x365 = 10, 950 lines. Assuming 50 lines a page, you would need 219 hard copy pages.

And that’s just for starters. Your first schedule would assume that all payments are posted on the due date, say the 17^th of the month. If your first payment is actually credited on the 16^th or the 18^th, assuming you want the schedule past that point to be accurate, you would have to redo the entire schedule. The same holds if you make an extra payment at any time.

Note that on a simple interest loan, what matters is not when you make the payment but when the lender credits your account. On a monthly accrual mortgage, if you pay on the 8^th and your account is not credited until the 10^th, it doesn’t matter because your payment is within the grace period. But on a simple interest mortgage, the two days between payment and posting will cost you two days of interest.

A Simple Interest Amortization Spreadsheet Is Now Available

The upshot is that developing a hard copy amortization schedule for a simple interest mortgage is not practical. The good news, however, is that a virtual substitute is available. I have placed an Excel spreadsheet on my web site that accrues interest daily, allowing you to keep track of exactly where you are on your simple interest mortgage. Click on Monitoring Amortization of a Simple Interest Loan. You can keep a permanent record by downloading the spreadsheet onto your computer and entering each payment when you make it.

Just remember that you enter the payment as of the date it is posted to your account, not the day you think it should have been posted. This may require that you do some research on the lender’s internal operating procedures. Not the least benefit of monitoring a simple interest mortgage with a spreadsheet is that it will quickly reveal any payment posting shenanigans by the lender.

The program you download has a complete amortization schedule built-in based on payment every 30 days. If you actually followed that routine religiously, you would pay off a 30-year 6% loan in 10,560 days, or 398 days early. That gives you something to shoot for. If you don’t make the payment on the date assumed by the spreadsheet, you delete it and insert the payment on the date you do make it. The entire schedule beyond that point will automatically recalculate – that’s the power of a spreadsheet.

Copyright Jack Guttentag 2008