Have you ever heard the word amortization? Most people have done it at least one time in the lives, as a matter of fact there are some people doing it right now, maybe you? Amortization means paying on a loan periodically. Your car payment would be an example or anything else that you took out a loan to purchase. Your home has a mortgage and that is a form of amortization, if you notice they both have the term mort in them and that means to kill. So in fact when you are making your loan payments you are killing off the loan.
Amortization is the whole process of you making periodical payments on your loan with a prearranged number of payments. Typically most loans are based on the same calculations, meaning the entire amount of your loan or principle, the amount of payments necessary to pay it off- usually monthly payments, and the interest incurred on the loan.
For example if you purchased a car for $20,000 and you made a down payment of $5000 you would be left with the principle of $15,000. So your loan would have to be for $15,000 and then you would make monthly payments for 5 years with an interest rate of 5%.
Your monthly payments would look something...