the following kinds of fees are: The discretion that is illustrated in the "sometimes included" column even in the highly regulated U.S. home mortgage environment makes it difficult to simply compare the APRs of two lenders. Note: U.S. regulators generally require a lender to use the same assumptions and definitions in their calculation of APR for each of their products even though they cannot force consistency across lenders. With respect to items that may be sold with vendor financing, for example, automobile leasing, the notional cost of the good may effectively be hidden and the APR subsequently rendered meaningless. An example is a case where an automobile is leased to a customer based on a "manufacturer's suggested retail price" with a low APR: the vendor may be accepting a lower lease rate as a trade-off against a higher sale price. Had the customer self-financed, a discounted sales price may have been accepted by the vendor; in other words, the customer has received cheap financing in exchange for paying a higher purchase price, and the quoted APR understates the true cost of the financing. In this case, the only meaningful way to establish the "true" APR would involve arranging financing through other sources, determining the lowest-acceptable cash price and comparing the financing terms (which may not be feasible in all circumstances). For leases where the lessee has a purchase option at the end of the lease term, the cost of the APR is further complicated by this option. In effect, the lease includes a put option back to the manufacturer (or, alternatively, a call option for the consumer), and the value (or cost) of this option to the consumer is not transparent. Dependence on loan period APR is dependent on the time period for which the loan is calculated. That is, the APR for a 30-year loan cannot be compared to the APR for a 20-year loan. APR can be used to show the relative impact of different payment schedules (such as balloon payments or biweekly payments instead of straight monthly payments), but most standard APR calculators have difficulty with those calculations. Furthermore, most APR calculators assume that an individual will keep a particular loan until the end of the defined repayment period, resulting in the up-front fixed closing costs being amortized over the full term of the loan. If the consumer pays the loan off early, the effective interest rate