Your uncle starts droning on about a steak he ate in 1984. Trying to be nice, you make an attempt to listen, but you undergo something close to an out-of-body experience. Your mind totally detaches, and suddenly you can't hear him at all...just an incessant buzzing in your ears as your spirit slowing drifts away. Interest shortfall.
There's also a finance-related connotation for the term "interest shortfall," though.
You have an adjustable-rate mortgage. That structure means that the amount you owe can change based on fluctuations in overall interest rates. Your mortgage contract has a limit on how much your monthly payment can change when interest rates re-adjust. However, the rates themselves can alter more than the monthly payment.
At some point during your loan, interest rates skyrocket. The monthly payment, protected by the caps, only moves a relatively small amount. But the rates themselves have moved much more dramatically. As a result, there's a certain amount of interest not covered by your monthly mortgage bill. Essentially, your payment is too low to pay back the loan completely, at least as it now stands.
This situation constitutes an interest shortfall. Your payments are too small to cover all the interest you owe. In other words...there's a shortfall.
The additional interest payments are added to the principal of the loan, essentially extending the period of time it will take you to pay off the mortgage. The situation caused by the interest shortfall is known as negative amortization.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is interest?20 Views
finance a la shmoop. what is interest? well you know how common the catchphrase
that's interesting is used? why well because something of interest is something of [man stands in theme park]
value. right if it's interesting it's valuable to know. yeah that's where the
notion of interest came from. so financially speaking the thing of value
you have is your capital- your money- the dough you saved from mowing lawns all
summer. and you can use that capital to make more capital for yourself without
having to you know mow more lawns. all right well how do you pull off this
magic? you invest your money and one interesting way to invest it in is in
bonds, which conveniently for this video pay interest. well interest is just rent
on the money you're loaning someone. and when you buy a bond you are the landlord,
right you're renting out your money to someone else, that is people will pay you
say 60 bucks a year to rent a thousand dollars from you the rate they're paying [kid rents money from a stand]
then is 6% a year to rent that lawn-mowing grant. and if you were buying
a formal publicly traded bond like the ones offered by say ATT or Comcast or
Time Warner and others, well you'd be paid your interest twice a year. that is
you'd get 30 bucks on June 30th and another 30 bucks just before New Year's
Eve, just in time to buy a bunch of those obnoxious noisemakers. and you'd collect
that interest until the bond says it'll pay you back your original amount called
principle. so if this were a ten-year bond paying 6% interest well your
little journey and renting your grand to AT&T would look like this - see you got
June 30 2020 collect 30 and then it goes December and during the design it goes I [interest shown on document]
don't know until you collect your thousand bucks. got it?
note how much interest you made from the grand you invested in that 6% bond. you
did nothing for 10 years just sitting on your fat butt watching the Cleveland
Browns lose football games, and you collected 30 dollars 20 times for a
total of 600 bucks in total interest, and then you got your grand
back. 600 bucks for doing well pretty much nothing a concept with which the
Cleveland Browns are oh so familiar. [man sleeps on couch holding cash]
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