IMF Loan

"IMF Loan ability: Gives you $10,000 but you have to pay it back over time."

- In-game description

IMF Loan is the Path 2, Tier 4 upgrade of the Banana Farm in BTD6. It has a special ability where, upon activation, the player is loaned $10,000, at the cost that half of the player's earnings to go into paying it off gradually. The special ability has a cooldown time of 90 seconds, and additionally can't be used until the loan is entirely paid off.

IMF Loan Ability
Upon activation, the player will receive $10,000 but at the cost of $10,000 debt. The ability will recharge after 90 seconds, but can only be activated again if all of that IMF Loan Bank’s debt is paid off.

How the “debt” works is that 50% of all income gained from all sources will be used to pay off the debt. The amount of income used to pay off the debt is split evenly among each IMF Loan that owes money. The in-debt penalty will remain until all of the debt is paid off. The amount of debt is displayed to the right of the cash counter on the top of the screen. The amount of debt of a certain IMF Loan Bank is shown in the respective IMF Loan Bank.

Unlike normal loans, the player cannot manually pay off the debt of a certain IMF Loan Bank.

Strategies
IMF Loan is a tricky ability to master, as though it is an ability explicitly about gaining money in a large burst, it effectively cancels out the profit with the penalty of a loan which halves the gains of all revenue sources by paying itself off, leading to an ability that has a net total of zero change in the long-run.

However, the use of the ability can be one of the most powerful in some regards, as it provides the player with a powerful utility: sudden income for panic purchases or reinvestment into other Banana Farms. For the former, having an extra $10,000 to use in the now can be a major game changer, providing a large portion of cash for the cost of expensive, powerful towers, potentially allowing a defense to hold out where waiting for $10,000 to come naturally would be irrelevent since the player would have lost the game.

The latter on the other hand provide a high risk in crippling economic gains in favor for long-term revenue, but can help to pay off the debt the ability itself creates. This can also be seen with the use of the ability to upgrade the IMF Loan building itself into a Monkey-Nomics building, providing anywhere from an eighth to one twelfth of the total cost depending on difficulty cost modifier, as well as opening the Tier 5 ability to help pay off the resulting debt quickly.

One important factor that can help increase the effectivity of the IMF Loan ability is a piece of Monkey Knowledge, being Backroom Deals. With Backroom Deals, $12,000 is loaned off at a time, effectively increasing the potency of the ability by 20%. This also is compounded with a 40% payoff rate and the resulting $12,000 debt, making payoff much longer but also far less taxing if more money is required during the payoff period. With this in play, it exacerbates both positives and negatives of the ability, though the benefit far outweighs the damage, as an extra $2,000 can allow for earlier high-cost purchases on revenue building towers and set up for a heavily prepared late game.

Update History
Cost of IMF Loan is cheaper ($12000 --> $7500)
 * 4.0

Trivia

 * The IMF Loan's loan does not work like a real-life loan for the following reasons:
 * Real-life loans require all of the loan plus interest to be paid off until the loan debt reaches the maximum loan debt allowance, which otherwise would lead to financial consequences
 * Paying of the IMF Loan debt decreases with the increase of income gain (from any source or income gain), rather than not gaining income as debt is being paid off.
 * Such automatic paying off the loan is always 50% of the income earned, but automatic paying off loans does not exist or is not commonplace.