How many different types of loans are there? Well, we don't know either, but we intend to find out. We're going to find out how many different types there are by providing you with a page on this site for every one of them. Once this site is finally done, we'll know how many different kinds there are.
Sure, we could just count them, but how useful would that be? No, we think it's much more useful to provide you with information about all of the different types of loans so that you can make an informed decision when you go looking for the money that you need.
In general, the different types of loans out there come about from a fairly short list of attributes that are combined in a myriad of different ways.
For instance, we can start with how the loan is "collateralized". That's a big fancy word for how the lender protects his investment. This one attribute of a loan can run the gamut from seemingly no collateral at all as in the case of a credit card, to a fully collateralized mortgage loan where the investment may be secured by an interest in a property that is worth more than the amount of the loan. There are, of course, dozens of stops along the way between these two extremes, and every one of them creates a class of loans.
There is also the attribute of how the loan is payed back. Is it a "revolving line of credit" like a credit card, where the customer decides when and how much to pay or borrow? Or is there a fixed monthly payment that pays off the monthly interest and a portion of the principal as in a conventional mortgage loan or car loan? Or is it one of the more unconventional mortgage loans available today such as an "interest only" loan, where no principal is paid back for a pre-determined number of years.
You also have some variation in the way interest is charged on the loan, such as a zero interest car loan, a simple interest loan, a fixed mortgage loan or a variable rate home loan where the payments change over time.
Of course there is also the question of what you are going to do with the money, which is often tied in with the question of how the loan will be secured. Here though, we enter some new territory such as a business loan that may be used to buy something as esoteric as advertising during the Super Bowl. There are quite a few other types of business loans such as factoring loans that help smooth out a company's cash flow and startup loans or venture capital loans that may be completely speculative with no security at all.
Just these four different attributes that play a part in diversifying the "loan universe", provide a staggering variety of different loans.
We hope you will find information on the type of loan you're looking for here. If you don't, please let us know!