If you’re looking to finance – or refinance – your RV purchase, you might want to look at an easy-to-use loan calculator supplied free by, and available at, Forbes.com.
To use the loan calculator, enter your loan amount, the length of term for your loan, and the annual percentage rate. The calculator will immediately kick back the total loan cost, the monthly payment amount, and the total interest you’ll pay during the life of the loan.
You can also make another click and see a loan amortization graph and schedule, along with a loan breakdown that graphically shows you how much of your loan is actually principal and how much will be interest payments.
What else will it teach me?
The article that goes along with the calculator also talks about how to get an RV loan, what makes a good RV loan interest rate, RV loan alternatives, and a list of frequently asked questions.
It’s often hard to find a useful tool that doesn’t have any strings attached. It appears the Forbes.com calculator is nearly strings-free, and doesn’t ask for any personal information or require links to a lender site. There are links for “more information” that could lead you down a rabbit hole of agents, but the tool itself is free of those. There is an editor’s note at the top of the article that states: “Editorial Note: Forbes Advisor may earn a commission on sales made from partner links on this page, but that doesn’t affect our editors’ opinions or evaluations.”
How does the RV loan calculator it work?
Here’s an example of how the tool works: If you’ve got your eye on a sweet $200,000 Class A and think you can swing a 20-year loan at, say, 7 percent interest, you can quickly calculate that your monthly payments will be $1,550.60 a month and you’ll pay a total of $172,143.49 in interest over the life of the loan. That makes the total cost of your $200,000 rig a whopping $372,143.49 by the time it’s fully paid for.
Hopefully, you’ll have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that rig over those 20 years (if you still have it), and you didn’t have to spend tons on repairs, or leave it sitting in the shop for too long awaiting parts and repairs. Unlike your sticks-and-bricks house, your rig isn’t likely to appreciate in value, and some RV parks may put out the “not welcome” mat when you roll in the gate with your “classic” rig.
The bottom line is, it’s always best to have every scrap of information available to you before you make a major life purchase, and an RV of any class is certainly a major purchase for any family.
Here’s the link to the loan calculator.
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