Early loan repayment causes loss of total duration

I’ve been using (and loving!) the loan contracts, but a common issue that comes up with many people I make loans to is the loss of loan time when a user pays a payment early.

As an example, I might make a 2 week, 1m AIC loan with a very small weekly payment. A few hours after I pay out the 1m, the loan recipient sees a row reading:

6d, 21hr, Pay $1000, [Fulfill]

Then perhaps on accident, or perhaps out of habit, they click the green button, and suddenly they have 7 days to pay back the entire 1m, when they expected to have 14 days to do it.

I would strongly prefer that any unused time be added to the deadline of the next task in the contract, so they would have (7d + 6d 21hr) to make the final payment. This is how my home loan works IRL.

In my opinion, getting credited for by having your interest reduced by early payments is unimportant, as long as the total time is preserved.

Correcting or walking back this mistake on a loan contract can be very difficult. It’s possible to issue new loans to replace the old loans, but it requires the lender to have extra capital and exposes them to risk while the recipient has both loans out. It’s also very annoying to walk back the interest costs. So making this change would be very impactful.

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Having this same logic applied to shipping contracts would give us a lot more resolution in defining the terms, and final deadline, of public shipping. I like it for both!

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It’s not just mistakes that reduce the time. It’s also paying 1h early, or 5h early because you go to bed. With a loan that has like 20 payments, paying each one 5 hours early, results in a “loss” of 4 days. That also of course changes the actual interest over time.

So yeah, the extra time should always roll over to the next milestone.

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For what it’s worth, loans automatically autopay when the deadline reaches t=0. As long as you have cash in your account, it will just work with no input required from you.

Brilliant idea, would love to see it implemented.