Legal Question in Business Law in California

The first question that needs to be asked and answered here is what kind of a financial institution is your car finance company? That will determine whether California or Federal law governs the lender's duty to include certain data in monthly statements. There is a case, for example, holding that 12 CFR 560.2 exempts Federally-chartered savings and loan companies from state laws requiring certain disclosures in automobile lending trasnactions, giving the entire subject to the feds. If California law applies, the applicable law would probably be the Rees-Levering Automobile Sales Finance Act, found in the Civil Code at sections 2981 through 2984.6. Section 2982 of the Rees-Levering Act is entitled "Formalities of conditional sale contracts" and is about 4 pages of fine print detailing everything that must go into your financing contract. Among the necessary items are details about principal and interest. However, I don't see anything here or elsewhere in state law requiring a breakdown of total balance or division of a monthly payment between principal and interest to be included in periodic statements. It seems a trifle odd that you get monthly statements without any breakdown; maybe you are just tearing coupons out of a booklet. Anyhow, the information necessary to compute each month's payment breakdown should be in your original finance agreement (assuming it complies with California law).