Choosing a Car Loan Repayment Schedule

How often should you make car loan repayments?

When getting a car loan, you may simply think that the car loan repayment schedule is predetermined. It’s useful to think about what repayments will work best for you as you might have the option of changing monthly payments to weekly or fortnightly.

Whichever option you choose, make sure you do some calculations to help you decide which is the best choice for you financially. You could save a lot in interest and fees by making your car loan repayments more regular.

Whatever your circumstances are, we can help you choose the right car loan repayment schedule. Find out how we help you get the best car loan for you.

What are the pros and cons?

It’s worth considering that interest is generally calculated daily on car loans. If you’re making more frequent repayments, every week or every fortnight, you can be confident that you’ll save a higher amount of interest over the course of the loan.

It’s important to find out whether you will get charged a fee for fortnightly payments. If so, be careful that you don’t actually end up paying more than you would if you’d simply opted for monthly repayments. Either way, use the car loan calculator to figure out the best option for you.

If you can afford to, it could be a good option to pay back more than the minimum required on your car loan – this means you’ll pay it off faster and have fewer days of collecting interest. Just check out whether early repayments will incur any fees.

Think about what will work best for you – this could involve all sorts of factors such as how often you get paid. If you get paid once a week or fortnightly, it could work well to schedule your repayments to these dates rather than once a month.

How to calculate the cost of your car loan repayment schedule

To calculate how much different options for car loan repayments will cost you, you’ll need some figures to do with your specific situation.

You can easily do this yourself with our car loans calculator which will ask you the following information to make a calculation specific to you:

• Vehicle purchase price
• Loan deposit
• Balloon payment
• Loan term
• Credit score

When you have input all of your relevant data, you’ll have the option to view how much weekly, fortnightly, and monthly car loan repayments would be.

Top tips to make sure your loan gets paid on time

Your car loan repayment schedule is just that - a schedule. You need to do everything you can to keep to it and not to default on your loan or miss repayments.

It’s really important that you get organised and make sure you make your car loan repayments on time – otherwise, it could have serious consequences for your credit rating and financial record.

Try these top tips to make sure you make your car loan repayments on time.

• Set up automatic payments so that the correct amount is taken from your bank account on a set date so you won’t have to remember to make the payment yourself.
• Set up reminders on your phone, computer, or in your diary so that you always remember to make your repayments on the correct date.
• Keep track of all the repayments that you’ve made so that you’re always aware of what you have paid and what remains to be paid over the course of your loan.

Choosing a car loan repayment schedule

Firstly you’ll need to check whether your lender offers the option of paying back your car loan on a weekly or fortnightly basis, rather than in monthly repayments. If they do, it should be fairly simple to switch your repayment schedule – just a phone call to them to set everything up. Remember to ask about any fees that this switch could incur to avoid unexpected costs.

Deciding the best time frame in which to repay your car loan requires a bit of planning which will really pay off in the long term. Do your calculations using our easy car loan calculator so that you know exactly where you’ll stand in the different scenarios.

If you don’t feel confident making the decision yourself, speak to our expert team to get the most up to date advice and help with making your decision. We have decades of experience and have helped thousands of people get the right car loan for them, so we can help save you time, money, and unnecessary stress.

Find out how we can help you get the best car loan to suit you.