A fictional world.
Real numbers.
Real consequences.
A thousand rupees today. A thousand decisions tomorrow. Stories and calculations about the cost of borrowing, and the possibilities of choosing differently.
Here for the arithmetic? The EMI calculator is where it always was, along with nine other tools.
Dhamaka Digital
a shop that does not exist
- 1 × phone
- ₹74,999
- Paid today
- ₹15,000
- 18 instalments of
- ₹3,771.32
- Processing fee
- ₹1,200
- What it comes to
- ₹84,084
Or wait 13 months, pay ₹66,909, and owe nobody.
Your future self would like a word.
Invented shop, computed figures. Assumptions
One decision, two futures
Rehan is twenty-six and the pen is on the counter. In one future he signs. In the other he walks out and pays the same ₹3,771 a month to himself. Same person, same money, same months.
Waiting saves him ₹9,085 in interest and fees. It also costs him 13 months of a better camera. Which matters more is not a calculation.
Change his numbersComputed from the story’s assumptions
Assumes a ₹74,999 phone, ₹15,000 in hand, a loan at 16% for 18 months with a 2% fee, savings at 6%, and a price that falls 10% a year. Everything it assumes and leaves out.
Stories
All storiesInvented people, believable decisions. Each story has a number on its cover, and that number was calculated, not written.
Waiting instead of borrowing
The Phone He Didn't Buy
Rehan had the pen in his hand and a salesman who called ₹3,771 a month 'one dinner'. He walked out. This is what the next 13 months cost him, and what they saved.
Small instalments, added up
The ₹999 Man
Paresh Solanki does not believe in prices. He believes in ₹999 a month. Then his wife lays seven warranty cards on the bed and asks him to count.
A short-term loan
One Missed Payday
Nandini's salary is twelve days late and her rent is not. Four doors are open to her. The one with no guard on it costs ₹1,050, and is not finished with her when she has paid.
The ₹999 question
Nobody decides to owe a lakh. They decide, seven separate times, that ₹999 a month is nothing.
The Solankis have 7 instalment plans at ₹999 each. None is late. None is large. Together they come to ₹6,993 a month, which is 14.6% of the household’s pay, and there are 99 instalments still to go.
Computed from the story’s assumptions
- Air cooler₹999 × 9
- Phone upgrade plan₹999 × 18
- Fitness watch₹999 × 6
- Gym membership₹999 × 10
- Spoken-English course₹999 × 12
- Orthopaedic mattress₹999 × 20
- Festival television₹999 × 24
- Every month
- ₹6,993
- Instalments still to pay
- 99
- Still to pay in all
- ₹98,901
Bars show months remaining on each plan. Fees and taxes on the plans are not known and not included. Assumptions.
The ripple effect
Five women in a village near Madurai each borrow for something that earns. They make one promise: if any of us cannot pay on Thursday, the rest of us will. In the ninth month, Selvi’s cow falls ill.
A loan is signed by one person and felt by several. Some gain, some pay, and the field officer’s tablet records that nothing happened.
Read The Thursday GroupThe maths behind the fiction
emi.me began as a set of EMI calculators that showed their working. They are all still here. The stories were built on top of them, not instead of them.
- One engine. Every figure on this site, in a story or a tool, comes from the same calculation code. No number in a story is typed by a writer.
- Checked from outside. The engine is tested against values worked out separately, in a different language, to fifty digits.
- Nothing hidden. Every result lists what it assumes and what it leaves out. The formulas are published.
- Nothing collected. The tools run in your browser. No sign-up, no ads, no tracking, no lenders.
Reference cases, computed on this page
| Loan | Rate | Months | EMI |
|---|---|---|---|
| ₹1,00,000 | 10% | 12 | ₹8,791.59 |
| ₹5,00,000 | 12% | 24 | ₹23,536.74 |
| ₹8,00,000 | 9.5% | 60 | ₹16,801.49 |
| ₹10,00,000 | 8.5% | 240 | ₹8,678.23 |
Reducing balance. These are four of the cases the test suite checks on every build.
The other side of borrowing
This is not a campaign against loans. A loan is a tool for moving money through time, and sometimes that is exactly what a person needs.
Shabnam borrowed ₹90,000 for an embroidery machine. It cost her ₹21,300 in interest and fees, and two bad nights in July. By her own records it had to earn ₹2,166 a month to be worth it, and it earned ₹6,500. Waiting would have been safer and, on those numbers, ₹1,30,020 poorer.
The same loan with no orders behind it would have been a mistake. The story is about how she knew the difference.
Borrowing that pays its way
The Machine in the Front Room
Shabnam has stitched in the same room for sixteen years. An embroidery machine would change her work, and she can't afford it. A loans officer asks her one question, and she has been waiting a year for someone to ask it.
The number is only the beginning of the story.
We will not tell you whether to borrow. We will show you what it costs, what waiting costs, and who else it reaches. The rest is yours.