Model Repayment Schedule
The provision of comprehensive, consistent and easy to understand repayment schedules are an area where most financial institutions can improve the transparency of their pricing.
The MFTransparency Model Repayment Schedule has been designed to help providers of microfinance standardize their loan documentation, ensuring it is comprehensive and clear to the client. It is available both in PDF format, and as a usable excel tool, forming a sheet in the Calculating Transparent Prices Tool.
Loan documentation should always be considered from the point of view of the client, and the repayment schedule should show all expected payments from the client, including:
- Annual Percentage Rate (APR)
- Total Cost of the Loan (TCC)
- Fees and commissions paid – all fee names, amounts, dates, including taxes and insurance
- Installment information – repayment frequency, total number of installments, installment amount divided into principle and interest, with totals.
- Dates – of loan disbursement and loan repayments
- Existence of other loan features – Grace Period, security deposit (compulsory savings), penalties etc
- Contact details – of both the financial institution and the client
In addition to disclosing pricing terms through loan documentation, it can be equally important to communicate pricing to clients verbally. This is especially true for borrowers who are have a low level of literacy. In such cases pricing information should be communicated in the language best understood by the borrower.
The lender takes the ornigiation and any other fees from the loan at disbursement. If you take a loan for $ 5000 and there are 1% fees, then what is actually disbursed to you and the school will be $ 4550. You will be responsible for the full $ 5000 plus all interest accrued when you go into repayment. Be sure you read the fine print as this policy may differ by lender. Some lenders will add $ 50 to the loan and instead of you borrowing $ 5000, you will have borrowed $ 5050 for which you will be responsible. The lender would still take the fees from the disbursement but you and the school would receive $ 5000.