For Rs 25 lakh home loan, you may have to repay Rs 1 cr

If the current interest rates stay, you might end up shelling out more than Rs1 crore to pay off a Rs25 lakh home loan. How? Read on.

Six months is a long time, especially if you happened to take a home loan back then.
Banks were charging a floating interest rate of 11% on their home loans. The equated monthly instalment (EMI) on a 20-year loan (or 240 months) of Rs25 lakh would have worked out to Rs25,805 a month.

Around one-month back, banks raised the interest rate on floating rate home loans to 11.5% and have now raised it by another 0.75% to 12.25%.

Last time, hike in interest rates were not accompanied by an increase in EMI. Banks did the smarter thing and increased the tenure of the loan. The remaining tenure of the loan went up from 240 to 269 months.

If banks were to follow the same strategy now and increase the tenure of the loan, instead of increasing the EMI, the remaining tenure of the loan would go up to 394 months. Add to this the six months of EMI you have already paid, and you are looking at a total tenure of 400 months. If you keep paying an EMI of Rs25,805 for a period of 400 months, you would have paid Rs1.03 crore (Rs25,805 x 400 months) by the end of it.

However, the bigger question is will banks allow tenures to shoot up to 400 months?