Cost of Debt, Formula, Calculation, and its Benefits

Introduction:

The cost of debt is considered as a specific amount of rate which a company must pay on its overall debt amount. It should be in our best interest that ‘cost of debt’ is analyzed either before tax or after tax return since some companies might as well deduct the interest expense and then evaluate its amount.

Finance experts consider it as a company’s structure associating with the cost of equity accordingly. Quite interestingly, the cost of debt helps in evaluating the debt financing since companies are liable to purchase bonds and bank-loans, making it easier to find the overall rate which an organization must pay within an agreed timeframe.

Furthermore, the current standing of the company can be evaluated through the cost of debt’s status as various investors would take this aspect into consideration and analyze the organization’s riskiness. It has been evaluated that companies that can go drastically down with their performance and profits exhibit higher cost of debt compared to the other ones in the market.

How To Evaluate The Cost of Debt?

We need to multiply the ‘Before Tax Value’ by‘1 – (Marginal Tax Rate Value)’ to acquire the ‘After Tax Rate’ amount. For example, if an organization has only one bond with an interest rate of 5% that it paid earlier then the ‘before tax cost’ would be considered as 5%.

Benefits:

There are numerous high-profile companies in the world that used ‘debt’ in order to rearrange their capital structure. It helps in minimizing the financing cost making it more superior than equity financing in one way or another. The return on equity is likely to enhance and the profits are kept well-secured within the organization after using the cost of debt.