Bear loan calculator: see the real cost first
Move three sliders and this bear loan calculator shows your estimated monthly payment, total interest, and total repayment — the three numbers every borrowing decision should start with. It runs entirely in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
The APR slider starts at 36% because that's the ceiling many consumer advocates and several state laws use for affordable credit, and runs to 300% because CFPB research shows short-term small-dollar products can reach and exceed that range. Your actual offer states its own APR.
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Three moves that shrink your total cost
- Shorten the term. At 90% APR, $1,000 over 6 months costs about $290 in interest; over 24 months, about $1,020. Same loan, three and a half times the interest, purely from time.
- Borrow the need, not the limit. Being approved for $3,000 is not a reason to take $3,000. Every extra hundred is a hundred plus interest.
- Prepay when you can. Most lenders in our network don't charge prepayment penalties — confirm in your agreement — so an extra payment goes straight at the principal.
When you're ready to see a real APR instead of a slider, the request form takes about five minutes and won't affect your FICO® score.
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Reading the three outputs like a lender does
Monthly payment
The affordability test. A common rule of thumb: keep all debt payments under roughly 36% of gross monthly income. If this payment pushes you past that, size down or lengthen the term deliberately — knowing the interest trade-off.
Total interest
The price tag of time. This is the number the term slider moves most violently. Comparing two offers? Compare their total interest at the same term, not their monthly payments at different terms.
Total repayment
The whole truth: principal plus interest. Federal Truth in Lending disclosures require your lender to state this before you sign — check that the contract figure matches your expectations from this tool.
Want the concepts behind the math? Our guide on how bear loans work walks through APR, finance charges, and payment schedules step by step, and the FAQ covers costs in question-and-answer form.
Three worked examples at 90% APR
Numbers stick better in context. Here's the calculator's own math for three common borrowing scenarios at the representative 90% APR used across this site — slide the controls above to match and you'll see identical figures.
| Scenario | Monthly payment | Total interest | Total repayment |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 over 6 months — a small bridge to steadier weeks | ~$107 | ~$145 | ~$645 |
| $1,500 over 12 months — a mid-size repair or bill cluster | ~$178 | ~$640 | ~$2,140 |
| $3,000 over 18 months — the top of sensible for this market | ~$302 | ~$2,430 | ~$5,430 |
Notice the pattern: the third loan borrows six times the first but pays nearly seventeen times the interest, because amount and term compound each other. That's the whole argument for borrowing small and short. It's also why the honest reading of any offer starts by asking whether a smaller amount or a shorter term still solves the actual problem — most emergencies have a precise price, and the gap between that price and a round number is pure interest you volunteered to pay.
Five terms the sliders are quietly teaching you
Principal
The amount you actually borrow — the first slider. Every repayment strategy is ultimately a plan for shrinking this number as fast as your budget allows.
APR
The annualized cost of the loan, interest plus mandatory fees, as a percentage. The comparison tool federal law gives you; the third slider here.
Finance charge
The cost in dollars — our "total interest" output. Truth in Lending requires your lender to state it before you sign; it should match what this tool predicts for the same inputs.
Amortization
The schedule that splits each fixed payment between interest and principal. Early payments are interest-heavy, later ones principal-heavy — which is why prepaying early in the term saves the most.
Prepayment penalty
A fee some lenders charge for paying early. Most in our network don't — but the clause to confirm is in your agreement, not on anyone's homepage.
Total of payments
Principal plus finance charge — our third output, and the single most honest number on any offer. If it surprises you at signing, stop and re-read before you e-sign.
How the math works under the hood
No mystery, just one formula. The calculator converts your APR into a monthly rate by dividing by twelve, then solves for the fixed payment that retires the whole balance — principal and accumulating interest together — in exactly the number of months you chose. Finance professionals call it the amortization formula; your mortgage, your car loan, and the offer a lender sends you all use the same one.
The consequence worth understanding: each identical payment is split differently as time passes. In month one, most of the payment services interest on the full balance; by the final months, the balance is small, the interest sliver is tiny, and nearly the whole payment attacks principal. Two practical lessons fall out of that mechanic. First, prepaying is most powerful early in the term, when it removes the balance that generates the most future interest. Second, a payoff quote from your lender will always beat multiplying your payment by remaining months — the schedule front-loaded the interest, so ending early skips the cheap tail, not the expensive head.
Our tool assumes no fees so the three outputs isolate pure interest cost. Real offers may add an origination fee (often deducted from the deposit) or charge per-event fees for late or returned payments — those appear in your Truth in Lending disclosure, and adding them to our "total repayment" figure reconstructs the true all-in cost of any offer in about thirty seconds.
Budgeting the payment: two tests before you accept
The 50/30/20 stress test
A widely used budgeting frame splits take-home pay into roughly 50% needs, 30% wants, and 20% saving and debt repayment. Slot the calculator's monthly payment into that last bucket: if the payment alone consumes the entire 20% — or forces raids on the needs half — the loan is oversized for your income no matter how badly the expense hurts. Shrink the amount or stretch the term until the payment fits, then compare the interest cost of each route above.
The bad-month test
Don't budget the payment against your best month; budget it against your worst realistic one — the month with a short paycheck, a school expense, and a birthday. If the payment survives that month on paper, it will survive the term in practice. If it only works when everything goes right, you're not borrowing money, you're borrowing luck, and the late-fee schedule in the agreement is the price of luck running out.
Both tests take five minutes with the sliders above, and both are cheaper than learning the same lesson from a collections call. Borrowers who size payments this way are heavily represented among the five-star experiences on our reviews page; the ones who didn't are the cautionary three-star tales.
APR, interest rate, and fees: untangling the trio
Offers sometimes display several percentages, and confusing them costs money. The interest rate is the raw price of borrowing the principal. Fees — origination, administrative — are one-time charges layered on top. The APR is the legally standardized blend of both, annualized, which is exactly why federal law makes it the mandatory headline: it's the only number that lets a fee-heavy low-rate offer and a fee-free higher-rate offer be compared honestly on one scale. When two offers compete for the same amount and term, the lower APR wins, full stop — whatever the individual components look like. Our sliders speak APR for the same reason; whatever combination of rate and mandatory fees a lender uses, the APR they disclose is the number to type in here.
When the calculator says no
Sometimes the honest output of this tool is "don't." If every combination of sliders that covers your expense produces a payment that fails the budget tests above, the answer isn't a creative term length — it's a different tool. Ask the biller about a payment plan (medical providers especially say yes more than people expect). Check the sub-36% lenders and fee-free options in our alternatives guide. Ask your employer about an earned-wage advance. And if the gap is chronic rather than one-time, the CFPB's guidance on nonprofit credit counseling — linked from our FAQ — addresses the actual problem instead of financing it. A calculator that only ever said yes would be an advertisement; this one is a tool, and tools tell the truth.