I'm always paying, never make it, but you can't look back

[venta]

So, sums. I can, broadly speaking, do sums. I have a degree in maths.

However, interest rate calculations have always baffled me. Sure, if you ask me to calculate 3 months compound interest at a monthly rate of x% I know what to do. However, when it comes to real examples of mortgages and credit cards, I can't work out what the sum I need to do is. I'm still slightly baffled about the interest charged me when I was a day late paying my credit card off in full in March.

Today, the BBC carried a story about a loanshark. It includes the following statement about someone who borrowed £1000:

"...to pay £49 a week over 60 weeks, making the total amount he had to
repay £2,940 at 917% APR."

Now, if we approximate 60 weeks to a year, then surely that's an annual interest rate of no more than 294%. The quoted APR isn't even in vaguely the right ballpark.

So... have I completely failed to understand APR ? (Wikipedia's page on the subject didn't really help with the definition.) Or is the BBC publishing unmitigated wank in the name of investigative journalism ?

Edit It turns out I'd failed to understand APR, and the BBC is cleared in this instance.

Comments

[chrisvenus]

I've realised I am making an absolute pigs ear of explaining this due trying to put my understanding of things in terms of how other people are expressing things. :) I made a pretty fundamental mistake in the above in that what I meant was:

You add up all these payments and then solve for sum("repayments+virtual interest") = amount borrowed*interest^60.

Essentially the technique above was meant to simulate putting your repayments in separate savings so your loan is gaining interest on the full amount until you repay it in lump once your payment plan has matched that value.

Breaking it down to simple parts is probably the best way to understand it though. And if I try to do it from first principles then hopefully any mistakes I make will be obvious. :) To get the 917% all you need to do is say each time you make a repayment you apply weekly interest to the loan amount and subtract the repayment.

In mathsy terms if f(n) = amount owed after n weeks ( i = interest, r = repayment) then:

f(0) = 1000.
f(1) = 1000*i-r (applied interest and subtracted repayment)
and in general:
f(n) = f(n-1)*i-r (applied interest to previous owed amount and subtracted repayment)
you can substitute things to get:

f(n) = (f(n-2)*i-r)*i-r = f(n-2)*i^2-r*i-r
f(n) = (f(n-3)*i-r)*i^2-ri-r = f(n-3)*i^3-r*i^2-r*i-r

Since you have paid off the loan after 60 payments then f(60) = 0.

You can then combine the series expansion that you could see developing with the known endpoint to get something like:

f(60) = f(0)*i^60 - r*i^59 - r*i^58 - r*i^57 ... - r^2 - r

(this is where I occasionally get confused by how many terms I should be having here and so on)

f(60) of course in this case is 0 so we can solve

f(0)*i^60 = r*i^59 + r*i^58 + r*i^57 ... + r^2 + r

And this is the equation I was badly trying to replicate above.

Also the right hand side simplifies to r*((i^60-i)/(i-1).

This is where the javascript fx comes from. I always get confused as I say in expanding things and working out where my series stop which is probably why I have i^60 whereas they had i^61.

You get the general principle and if you bothered to work it out properly then you'd get right answers.

And now I am stopping. If I've not explained myself properly this time I'm just goign to give up my teaching career. :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Wow! Thanks, that is actually very well explained.

Essentially the technique above was meant to simulate putting your repayments in separate savings so your loan is gaining interest on the full amount until you repay it in lump once your payment plan has matched that value.

That was a fairly useful starting point, and the numbers all seem sensible now. I can understand getting confused with endpoints, and I was always crap at summing series.

You can be Designated Hero of this Week, and you may now stop wasting your time explaining things to the stupid :)

[chrisvenus]

explaining things to the stupid

To be fair you seemed to understand it perfectly the first time I explained it without any mistakes in my explanation. ;-)