Understanding Waterfall Payment Structures
Let me explain what a waterfall payment structure is—it's a system that sets the priority and order for making interest and principal payments to creditors, with rankings that can shift in certain situations.
What Is a Waterfall Payment?
Picture a waterfall flowing down into buckets stacked vertically; the water is the money, and the buckets are the creditors. The top bucket fills completely before any water reaches the next one, and this continues down the line.
That's exactly how a waterfall payment structure operates for debtors and creditors. You structure these into tranches to pay off the highest-principal loans first, as they're usually the most expensive ones.
Key Takeaways
In this setup, higher-tiered creditors get their principal and interest paid before lower-tiered ones do. Lower-tier creditors only receive interest payments until the higher ones are fully settled. You can design waterfall payments to tackle one loan at a time or to handle all loans in a systematic way.
How a Waterfall Payment Works
The buckets get smaller as you go down, meaning debt sizes decrease lower in the hierarchy. This makes sense because clearing large debts first lowers your insolvency risk and frees up cash for operations, capital spending, or investments.
This approach is ideal if you're a company with multiple loans. Say you have three loans with varying interest rates; you pay principal and interest on the priciest one while only covering interest on the others. Once that's paid off, you move to the next most expensive, and so on, until everything is cleared.
Example of Waterfall Payments
To show you how this works, consider a company with loans from Creditor A, B, and C, where A is top-tier and C is bottom. The debts are: A owes $5 million interest and $10 million principal; B owes $3 million interest and $8 million principal; C owes $1 million interest and $5 million principal.
In year one, the company earns $17 million. It pays off A's full $15 million, leaving $2 million, which goes to B—$1 million interest and $1 million principal. Now A is paid, B has $2 million interest and $7 million principal left, and C is unchanged.
In year two, with $13 million earned, it finishes B and starts on C, leaving C with $2 million principal owed. This is a simplified example; in practice, some structures ensure minimum interest payments to all tiers each cycle.
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