pay the price you are now. Pay extra 100 or so to the principal each month and this will make you pay the car off faster and save interest. For instance, 5 year loan, 60Months = $6k If your Monthly is 500 per a month that would decrease your interest by a lot and make you pay off your car 1 year in advance. It will decrease your interest because you wont be paying 1 year of interest on the car 
I think APR is calculated per month. So if your car is 8% per month, that would be 8% of 500 goes to interest. Just looked at my receipt and this is correct. save $40 dollars a month and $480 dollars total from paying interest.
@Chris679 wrote:
Archange1, no offense but you don't know what you are talking about. You are going around spreading false info on a forum that people come to for correct information.
Non taken. I just pulled my receipt and the APR taken from the monthly payment was exactly the amount I had. Example, 500 x .0.03 went to the interest. Whenever I pay extra at my credit union, it goes towards the next month payment and lowering the pay off time but when i did that it also took out more interest. Unless I tell them to place it to the principal, i was still putting Money towards the interest.
What could hurt from telling the bank teller, here is my payment for 500 for this month. Could you put this extra 100 towards the principal?
Thanks XTERROR for saving me
refi at lower rate and make extra payments to stay ahead and less interest.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Chris679 wrote:
Archange1, no offense but you don't know what you are talking about. You are going around spreading false info on a forum that people come to for correct information.Non taken. I just pulled my receipt and the APR taken from the monthly payment was exactly the amount I had. Example, 500 x .0.03 went to the interest. Whenever I pay extra at my credit union, it goes towards the next month payment and lowering the pay off time but when i did that it also took out more interest. Unless I tell them to place it to the principal, i was still putting Money towards the interest.
What could hurt from telling the bank teller, here is my payment for 500 for this month. Could you put this extra 100 towards the principal?
Thanks XTERROR for saving me
Assuming your apr is 3% and we are talking about a month with 30 days then I would guess the principal amount of your loan to be about $6083. It is a total coincidence that 3% of $500 equals the $30 interest charge per month because the payment amount has no effect on the interest charge. To calculate daily interest rate we would take the principal $6083 * .03 / 365 = $.50 per day of interest. That's $15 of accumulated interest over 30 days.
There would be no hurt in the scenario you mentinoed but there would be no benefit to a principal only payment either. You just paid off the $15 of interest due with your normal $500 payment so anything over that is going 100% to the principal. If you wait one day to give the teller the same $100 and ask for principal only you would pay an extra $.50 on the principal but you still have to pay that interest when you make your regularly scheduled monthly payment. The benefit for you is saving interest that would have been charged on that $.50 but that is only one hundredth of a penny of the course of the month! If you just hand that $100 to the teller and let them pay as usual you lose the hundreth of a penny but you are now $100 ahead on your loan and have added flexibility. Next month or any month after that you can only pay $400 and still be current. People think they are gaining something with principal only payments when all they are really doing is losing flexibility to save a tiny fraction of a penny in interest charges.
What I do is pay weekly based on the monthly payment / 4. That way I save on interest by paying weekly rather than once per month. I also gain make an extra payment every three months since there are 4.3 weeks per month and that adds up quickly. Also because I get paid weekly I don't even notice the money is gone because it comes out at the same time as my direct deposit.