that's kind of weird, does the pure calculation cost anything?
Otherwise, I'm tending towards immediate repayment. It's also psychologically more sensible. Money in the account leads to all sorts of nonsense^^
I do understand the bank a bit if they don't want to recalculate the prepayment penalty for every borrower all the time. I think that would actually get out of hand if they always made it that easy. So it causes personnel costs :)
I can't estimate how much time they need for the calculation, so for now I accept their procedure.
We are currently setting the maximum annual special repayment for 9, 8, 7… years, as long as it pays off because of the interest rate difference. Nothing tempts here, because it’s fixed. The situation is similar, money is there, the interest gain is higher than the interest debt. For me, only low-risk fixed deposits of the corresponding amount come into question here. The "debt" is de facto covered by the fixed deposit.
I have now slept on the topic generally once again and see it exactly the same way. It doesn't make any sense at all to aim for special repayments at such low financing interest rates if the secure investment of the money leads to significant additional income through interest earnings. Therefore, the following exemplary calculation is actually very telling:
86000 * 0.0167 * 5 years = €7,181 saved interest, minus prepayment penalty/processing fees in case of early loan repayment
86000 * 0.034 = €2,924 annual interest income, minus €231 withholding tax (25%) on the income above €2,000, resulting in an annual interest income after tax of €2,693 or €13,465 over 5 years.
That means the fixed deposit variant over 5 years beats the early repayment of the loan by at least €6,284.
Compound interest effects omitted for simplicity.
You really destroy quite a lot of money just to be debt-free early "for the sake of your mind."
Important for the investment here is also the consideration whether to invest the money now for a longer period (5, 10 years) or initially aim for 3, 6, or 12 months, since the trend of interest rates is still slightly rising at the moment. For example, we invested €100k in Sept. 2022 for 12 months at 0.75% (equity for the house construction which we won’t need again until Sept. 23) and meanwhile we would get 2.2% for the same term. Maybe you could also split it: invest 50% of the capital long-term right away and run this short-term strategy with 50% of the capital until an interest rate level is reached that you believe (does not mean know) is now "high enough" and then also invest it for several years.