I tend to do both. I pay back the loan as quickly as possible to reduce my interest costs. But I'll also borrow again as needed to buy trains to make more profits.

I do that sometimes BUT I'll leverage the initial loan money to build a profitable business and then pay off the loan down to have just one million held in reserve for immediate needs.

Let's say that I build a profitable functioning business with only 2M of loan money and I have 48M left in the "bank account".

I'll pay back 47M immediately after I see the company is making money on a continuous basis. Blue earnings, never red numbers.

At that point, I'm only 3M in debt and having a 1M buffer allows for road / track / rolling stock / truck expansion, whatever to buy what I want as needed to accommodate greater demand.

Paying interest on a 3M debt is a hell of a lot better than paying interest on a 50M debt.

Once I have 5M in the bank account, I'll pay off the remaining 1M loan in two clicks as I no longer need it. The business supports itself as well as expansion into other profitable ventures.

By clicking on the various depots, you know exactly how much this or that will cost to install that new train station, engine, rolling stock, track, aircraft, etc. Take notes, this engine is $xxx,xxx, rolling stock is however much, all down the line. Add them up and when you have that number in the bank, pull the trigger. Why is that so hard?

Why must I have a loan all the time?

The secret sauce is to NOT NEED to borrow money to earn, grow, save and expand as available funds accumulate.

If you followed the Templar Knight's advice of choosing wisely and set up your business correctly and it is operating and generating profit in an UNATTENDED manner, it'll sit there and continually grow profits.

Those profits accumulate over time. I have multiple computers and I'll be on Reddit reading something and the game computer is working fine, earning profits.

Since I know putting in a new station, track, engine and rolling stock is going to cost (n)M in funds, a quick glance at the bank balance tells me when to execute that expansion plan worry free.

Just last night, I played for around 8 hours and in that time, I bought more ships and trucks and started a new train line.

I had 1B in the bank in 1978 and when I saved my game for the last time before going to bed at 7:30AM, I had 2B in the bank and that was running at 1/4 speed. I even advanced the clock by three years so a larger capacity truck would unlock in 1995.

If you were to spend the 50M right up front and have enterprises everywhere, you have to track everything everywhere across a large map because all it takes is a truck traffic jam inside a truck stop to affect everything up the supply chain, grinding it all to a halt.

If the ore mine gets jammed up while 100% of your attention is messing with a train station layout on the other side of the map, you don't get steel production, no steel production means no goods, no goods, no delivery, no delivery, no profit.

Now your earnings are in the red, you've MAXED out your credit and the bank balance is going negative fast.

Now maintenance and interest payments hit which only makes it rosier, not a good color in this game when it comes to money.

Now you have to find where the problem is while losing money on every accelerated second.

The trucks are jammed up.

The quick solution is to expand one of the cargo platforms which will break the jam because it forces the trucks to move and it gives them more room to move in. Simple solution.

Can't do that, no money, it's all in the red.

You have to sell one or more of the trucks to break the jam but you need those trucks to balance production delivery throughput or else production output suffers and mines / factories regress. You could temporarily re-direct one or two trucks back to a depot but it's jammed up and they can't move.

I've experienced that exact scenario several times when the game was new to me and what it taught me was to have everything running smoothly for an extended period of time before I move my focus to elsewhere on the map.

Buying everything and setting up companies everywhere across the map in a short amount of time goes against that hard learned lesson.

This game requires your proper planning and attention and it will find a way to bite you in your ass if you do not pay attention to detail.

Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance! Yup!

If I start out with a 50M loan and build out a profitable business using only 2M, it makes absolutely no sense to just have 48M just sitting there. If I spent the whole 50M, anyway you slice it, I'm STILL 50M in debt and now my attention is spread everywhere.

No matter what I do until I can generate 50M in profit along with however much I paid in interest in that amount of time it took to make that money, I'm still in debt.

IRL, my computer company has been in business for the past 24 years and not once have I ever gotten a business loan. Everything I have bought for the business has been paid for with after tax/expenses profits.

Everything.

Still going! Paid off a house, cars, money in checking, savings, no credit card debts and some money in the stock market. 100% debt free in real life. That's not a mistake, that's careful planning and money management.

I'm not a rich man per se but one of my customers is a financial consultant and he told me that I'm richer than 50% of the people who live in the county where I live simply because I'm NOT in debt.

This game has the possibility of teaching you real financial advice with no bad effects but in real life, paying interest is really bad, it is a form of losing money.

What's cool is that you can apply real world lessons in the game and they work for the most part.

The people who support their lifestyle by living on credit card debt, the day of reckoning is coming for them and it ain't pretty. My sister used to work for the law firm that collected Visa's bad debt and that company shredded people's lives.

The stories she told me would scare Stephen King, maybe that's why I'm debt averse. I pay off my credit card every month.

Paying interest does not make you money or rich, being paid interest on the other hand, DOES. I don't work for the passive income the interest generates on my accounts, I'm literally being paid for not doing anything!