I used Claude to catch my bank overcharging my home loan EMI, using their own numbers against them Okay this turned into a longer post than I meant it to be, but I’ve been sitting on this for a few days and I need to get it out somewhere. Back in April 2024 I requested a disbursement of ₹5,24,958 for a home loan installment on my under-construction flat. SBI disbursed ₹39,37,387 instead. I remember just staring at the alert on my phone thinking I was misreading it. Ten times the amount. To my builder. For no reason I could figure out. What followed was honestly one of the more exhausting stretches of my adult life. Weeks of “we are checking the issue” replies that said nothing. Calling my property manager. CCing every email address the bank gave me. Eventually they admitted it in writing, my builder refunded part of it back to the bank, and I thought, okay, done, moving on. Except it wasn’t done. The part that came back never got cleanly corrected in my account, it just quietly got soaked up into future installments over the next year, and I only half understood that was happening at the time because nobody explained it, they just kept sending numbers. I let it go for a while. I had a lot going on and I think some part of me just didn’t have it in me to keep fighting a bank that clearly wasn’t going to volunteer anything. Then last week my pre-EMI period ended and full EMI started, and the number they set, ₹67,486, sat wrong with me. Not for any clever reason, just a gut feeling after everything that had already happened once. Turns out actually checking a gut feeling like that against a bank’s own math is genuinely hard. I’m not an accountant. I had to read a 13 page statement transaction by transaction going back to 2023. Figure out that EMI isn’t just some number they pick, it’s a formula, and you need the exact rate and exact remaining tenure to check it yourself. Then I found out the bank had two different figures for me on file, my “disbursed amount” and my “outstanding balance,” and they weren’t the same number, for reasons that trace all the way back to the mess from 2024. And at one point they sent me a reply that flat out contradicted something they’d told me a few days earlier, and I almost didn’t catch it because who reads their own email history that carefully. I did all of this with Claude over a couple of hours instead of what would’ve genuinely been days of squinting at PDFs and half remembered EMI formulas from some finance blog. I uploaded the statement, screenshots of every bank reply as it came in, and it just kept doing the actual arithmetic, telling me plainly when a number didn’t add up, and helping me write back to them using nothing but their own figures so there was nothing for them to argue with. New EMI: ₹53,928. Down from ₹67,486. That’s about ₹13,500 a month I’m not overpaying anymore, for the next 17 years, which is a genuinely stupid amount of money to have almost just let slide because I was tired. I’m still not done, honestly. There’s a real chance I overpaid pre-EMI interest for a year or more while their mistake was still sitting uncorrected in my balance, and I need to go fight that next, and I don’t fully have the energy for round two yet if I’m being honest. Mostly I’m posting this because I keep thinking about how close I came to just paying it. I wasn’t lazy, I was tired, and there’s a difference, and I don’t think banks always distinguish between the two. If you’re on a construction loan with any bank, please actually read your statement sometimes. And if something feels off, it’s worth having a second set of eyes on the actual numbers, even if that second set of eyes is an AI going through a boring PDF faster than you ever could.
- Text
- verbatim
- Model
- Claude
- Source
- Reddit ↗
- Published
- 2026-08
- Added
- 2026-09-22